A Moment With… Elaine Spires

Mrs Cissie Partridge

As a writer I have often struggled to classify my novels.  Romance?  Well… there is romance in them but they certainly don’t fall into the typical enemies-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers formats of most romantic novels.  Contemporary Fiction?  Some are.  Sagas?  Sort of.  Women’s Fiction? Getting warmer!  All of my books feature strong women.  But all the years I have been writing there was one genre that I’d always wanted to attempt: cozy mysteries.

When I went to live in Spain as a 19-year-old holiday rep — or courier as we were known in those days — clients would often offer me their paperbacks when they were leaving.  I’ve always been a voracious reader and I was extremely grateful for their generosity.  Thus I discovered so many authors, Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, Alistair Maclean to mention just a few.  However, there was one author’s name I was always delighted to see on my gifted books: Agatha Christie.

I devoured her books and fell into every trap, followed every red herring as the Queen of Whodunnits totally blindsided me.  I never once guessed who the murderer was.  I’ve also watched all the TV Miss Marples over the years, my favourite being Geraldine McEwan and I must have seen every episode of David Suchet as Poirot a dozen times.  From time to time over the years I would ask myself “Can I write a murder mystery?”

When the answer came back a couple of years ago “Well, you can have a go!” I knew that if I were to write a murder mystery I would have to be totally au fait with modern policing, forensics, IT, etc., and that was off-putting.  And besides, I knew inside that my murder mystery would have to be a cozy mystery.  Set in a gentler age where IT and DNA were still way off in the future.  I had written a series of novels set in my hometown of Dagenham, the Dagenham Story, and I soon realised that I was going to set my cozy mystery there, in 1950s.

I also knew that my unlikely sleuth was going to be a mix of the wonderful working-class women I grew up watching and admiring.

And so, Cissie Partridge was born.

Cissie is a housewife and she’s content with her lot.  She loves her husband Harold and gets on well with all her neighbours in the banjo where she lives.  For those who don’t know, a banjo is a pedestrianised cul-de-sac of which there are many in Dagenham.  They were built to provide a safe place for children to play away from the traffic and they became small, tight-knit communities.  Today, unfortunately, although they still exist this sense of community isn’t the same.  Cissie shops, cooks, helps out as a volunteer at the Docklands Settlement.  She is observant and wise and not much gets past her, and she just loves reading murder mysteries.  So when she finds a body in her back garden it’s as if one of her novels has come to life.

As I was writing A Body in the Banjo, I could hear Cissie’s voice, which was a blend of my mum’s, my aunts’ and all our neighbours.  Cissie, like them, had been a young woman during the war years.  She had had to make do and mend most of her life.  She had known personal tragedy in the death of her ten-year-old son and was also immensely proud of her daughter, Annie, who is training to be a nurse at the Mount Vernon Hospital.

I decided not to have her deliberately set out to solve the murder case, but rather to do so almost accidentally due to her powers of observation and knowledge of her local community.  At first DCI Grainger, the CID detective in charge of the case is quick to dismiss her, until he realises just how astute she is and how her observations are relevant to his investigation.

 I really love and admire Cissie, even though she is my own creation, mainly because she embodies the women of Dagenham I so admired growing up.  She was great fun to create and I’m pleased to say that there will be a second Cissie Partridge Mystery out in late spring.