Authorgraph No.224


events are set in motion and readers can happily come to The Pearl Thief knowing nothing of what lies in store for Julie during the Second World War.


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Here we get a younger and more carefree Julie, returning from boarding school to her home in rural Scotland for the last summer at the family estate before it is sold to raise much-needed money. Add in an accident, a host of potentially suspicious characters and some missing pearls and you have an old-school mystery book. Wein has long wanted to write a proper mystery story and the urge to revisit Julie was irresistible: ‘I’m such a fan of classic mysteries, and I love the 1930s, between-the-wars setting and the character of Julie just presented herself because she would have been in her teens then. I absolutely loved writing her narrative voice, it was so easy to channel.’


Although Julie will be familiar to many readers, The Pearl Thief isn’t a prequel in any traditional sense; when it comes to the plot there’s barely any foreshadowing: ‘I tried very hard not to be heavy- handed. I left the war out, even though there would have been rumblings of war around them. The story is very insulated from that - it’s a separate story. But Julie is the same and this is where the prequel quality comes in - you see why she develops into the character that she becomes.’


‘It’s easy to talk about the book in terms of Julie’s privilege, but that’s not something she or anyone around her would have applied to her situation’


Although Julie’s family are dealing with financial constraints, they are still a wealthy, titled family and Julie is forced to reevaluate what that really means in The Pearl Thief: ‘It’s interesting because I don’t believe the word privilege was in use at the time. It’s easy to talk about the book in terms of Julie’s privilege, but that’s not something she or anyone around her would have applied to her situation. So it was a concept I was dealing with very consciously, though not able to articulate it as such for any of the characters. The language of equality changes all the time - every term we use becomes loaded with negative connotations and then we have to get rid of it and find another one.’


The book covers big ideas of privilege and prejudice, as well as Julie’s burgeoning sexuality, but at its core The Pearl Thief is resolutely a mystery. Although several of Wein’s previous novels have a thrillery sort of feel to them (‘A lot of my novels are kind of mysteries - Code Name Verity even won an Edgar, which is supposed to be for the best mystery!’) with clues and reveals and plot twists, but writing an old-school mystery proved to be its own challenge: ‘I knew what the


8 Books for Keeps No.224 May 2017


lizabeth Wein’s new novel, The Pearl Thief, may technically be a companion book to her 2012 megahit Code Name Verity, but it is resolutely its own story. It follows Julie, one half of the duo at the heart of Wein’s Carnegie Medal-shortlisted book,


years before those


Elizabeth Wein Interviewed


by Anna James


big twist at the end was, it was how I was going to get there that I had trouble with! It was unbelievably hard to pull it all together and keep the tension up.’


Wein talks about having to research how long bodies deteriorate in water, how easy chimneys are to climb, and how to fish for pearls among other more niche queries - she also mentions finding a note to herself that said only ‘LEGS’ in capital letters which she couldn’t remember anything about. When she thought she was about there, and was two full drafts and five different editors in, a new editor read it and suggested a tweak on the reveal: ‘And I was like “oh my god yes!” - and of course that changed the entire plot and I went back and rewrote the whole book in six weeks and it just made so much more sense.’


The problem with writing mysteries is trying to see it from a reader’s perspective when you know all the answers: ‘I honestly don’t know what it looks like to someone who isn’t me writing it, what it looks like to a reader who comes to it fresh. I don’t know where their minds go as they’re working out the mystery and trying to figure out who did it. You have to give it to someone who hasn’t read it yet and let them have a look. It was so hard; I just kept flailing and the timing kept going wrong - it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.’


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