We chat with author Susanna Kearsley about The King’s Messenger, which explores romance, court alliances, and the limits of one’s duty in this rich story of an honorable man in service to a treacherous king, and the mission that brings him to love and his true calling.
Hi, Susanna! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi back! I’m a former museum curator who was born into a family of amateur genealogists, which means when I go down a research rabbit hole it ends up being more of a rabbit warren, and I can get lost there for days. Because of my dad’s work as an engineer, my family moved every few years when I was growing up, so I caught the travel bug early on, and while my home base has mostly been in Canada, I’ve also lived in South Korea, Wales and, briefly, Texas. My mom’s dad was a movie projectionist who used to take my sister and me to his movie theatre when we were little, and I blame him for the fact that sitting in the dark watching movies on the big screen is my happy place (I just wish everyone around me would stop talking).
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I honestly don’t remember not writing, but my love of stories most probably came from the fact that my parents read to my sister and me all the time. My mother read us Greek myths and fairy tales as bedtime stories, and my father would not only read to us, but would sometimes illustrate the stories as he read, which was a double treat. Our house was full of books – my mother owned an independent bookstore when I was little – and I was reading by the age of three, so books and stories opened my imagination very early on.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: By the Sea, a Whitman Big Tell-a-Tale book by Anne Welsh Guy. Unforgettably lyrical, with amazing illustrations by Wendell Kling and a perfect happy ending.
- The one that made you want to become an author: When I read Little Women, I felt an instant kinship with the character of Jo. I was already writing my own stories, but watching Jo write hers – and grow to earn her living doing it – made me believe that I could do that, too.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Hollow, by Agatha Christie. It’s not only a great mystery, but her characterizations in that book are so well drawn – she was such a master of creating characters, and she doesn’t get enough credit for that. And the ending of the Hollow has a very haunting quality that just sticks with me years after first reading it.
Your latest novel, The King’s Messenger, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Enemies to lovers road trip.
What can readers expect?
A reader who picks up The King’s Messenger can expect to be thrust back in time to Shakespeare’s day, and trying to survive within the corridors of intrigue of the royal court in London, and upon the rugged open roads of Scotland, with a very mismatched group of travelers. That reader can expect to find adventure, love in all its varied forms, found family, and good, ordinary people doing all they can to stand up to injustice. I can’t promise they will win, but I can promise it ends happily.
Where did the inspiration for The King’s Messenger come from?
Building books is a little like building a snowball – you pack on a little from here, and a little from there, and in time you end up with the perfect, round shape. In the case of The King’s Messenger, the first little bit of snow came in the form of a used book I found by chance years ago – The History of the King’s Messengers, by V. Wheeler-Holohan, from which I learned the history of that branch of the royal service, and how they weren’t only the messengers of the king, but the men who were sent to arrest traitors and return them to stand trial. It was an interesting book, but I didn’t have anywhere to use a King’s Messenger at the moment, so I set the book aside for later.
In the meantime, I wrote a book called The Winter Sea, whose historical hero John Moray, was a real-life character. His family’s descendants, who still live on the Scottish lands of Abercairny where John was born and raised, contacted me and became not only my friends, but a great help to me in my research, especially where it concerned their family history. And one of the things I discovered was that a member of their family, Sir David Moray, had been the closest servant and companion to Prince Henry, the elder brother of King Charles I. Prince Henry was a golden boy – athletic, clever, handsome, patron of the arts – who believed a king should rule by the will of his people, and not be absolute. His tragic death at 18 plunged the nation into mourning. Many claimed he had been poisoned. When I started exploring the history, I saw why.
So, I had my first bit of snow – a King’s Messenger, ready to be sent to find and arrest a traitor, and escort him to trial. And my second bit – Sir David Moray, who’d practically raised Prince Henry from childhood, and knew his closest secrets. And my third bit – the possible murder, by poison, of the prince. I just had to shape those three handfuls of snow into something that made the right shape.
Can you tell us a bit about your process when it came to researching for The King’s Messenger?
Because I don’t outline my books, my research process can be a little like the journey my characters take in The King’s Messenger – I start out with the basics I need, and then gather more along the way, because I don’t know what I’ll need to know until I get where I’m going. I like to rely, where possible, on the voices of people from the past – their letters and journals, if any were left behind – and on the original paintings and drawings that show me their world through the eyes of the people who lived in it.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Because I don’t properly outline my books, I sometimes get surprised in the best way by characters who just wander into the story. This happened in The King’s Messenger when my heroine stepped ashore at the port of Leith, in Scotland, and was met unexpectedly by a little boy named Hector Reid. He just turned up, I hadn’t planned for him to be there, but I’ve been doing this for enough years that I’ve learned that when a character walks into a story, the best thing to do is to leave them alone and see what happens. They can always be taken out in the rewrite, I tell myself (though I’ve never actually had to take one out). Hector ended up being a great joy to write – he brought out elements of the other characters that I don’t think would have come out otherwise, and I was always curious to see how he would turn the day’s events just by being part of the group. I’m glad he turned up on the Shore of Leith, and gladder still I let him stay.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Deadlines are always a challenge for me. They seem very far away when I begin the book, but they are a necessary part of my process, because without one, I’d probably just stay in the world of that book forever and never finish. Inevitably, I’ll look up from my writing and realize the deadline is very, very close, and then I’ll have to put my head down again and just write, and nothing else. It can be a gruelling and tiring time, but it’s always worth it, in the end.
What’s next for you?
Right now I’m working on a story with multiple timelines, one of which involves the son of the main characters of The King’s Messenger, and another of which is set in the present day – something I haven’t done for awhile, so I’m really enjoying the challenge.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
There are far too many books coming out this year that I want to read for me to list here, but I can give you a handful: Jon Hickey’s debut novel, Big Chief, for starters, Sonali Dev’s Something About Miri, Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Martian Contingency, V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, and Nalini Singh has two new books out this year – Archangel’s Ascension and Atonement Sky.
