Extract
On the morning Blossom brought the news that the Pardner Lady, also known as Constance Margorie Brown, was dead, Miss Hortense had not long finished watching Kilroy and was in the back garden pruning the Deep Secrets. Her blood- red roses, which she had planted a lifetime ago, were put there to stop her forgetting something that was, by its own nature, quite unforgettable. The sun hadn’t yet risen to its highest point and, as she knelt down, it filtered in through the leaves, playing a kind of peek-a-boo against her back.
coming together, accumulating their money and then distributing it [...] it’s also a really complex idea, because it’s based on community. It’s based on trust. You often have to have someone who is well respected in the community to be the person who puts everyone in line, the disciplinarian who makes sure that people contribute.” Pennant’s own grandmother was a Pardner
Lady, and while Pennant did not actively think “I’m going to write a book inspired by my grand- parents”, it was “amazing for me to see how much of their inspiration had come through in the book”. “The reason why [the Pardner network]
inspired this book is because my generation was all about individualism, but the gen- eration that came before had to survive and thrive based on this system of trusting and sharing,” she continues. “No one did it for them. There was no additional money put in. They had to support themselves, and this is how they did it. It was created as a solution to a problem: a lack of financial inclusion, or perhaps a distrust of establishments. Being marginalised. This was a system that created a practical solution for that.” The Pardner network as the lynchpin of Afro-
Caribbean communities got Pennant thinking about “the other areas where this society would have been denied”, including justice. While “the crime didn’t come first, the community did” in the writing of the novel, Pennant saw crime as a way to “explore their community”, with the Pardner network – led, at first, by Jamaican nurse Miss Hortense – eventually branching out to investigate crimes within the suburb. These crimes are referred to as Bones in the novel, in reference to the dominoes played by the characters.
a lightness to it and a humour, a camaraderie.” The result is a complexly woven plotline
spanning Birmingham, Jamaica, America and decades of accumulated grudges, secrets and mysteries. Miss Hortense, previously the Pardner Lady, kicked out years ago because of the way she doggedly pursued a case – Bone 12, still unsolved – has in her retirement been secretly investigating the investments of the network with her friend Blossom. She is suddenly dragged back into the melee when the new Pardner Lady, her successor, is found dead, followed by another body not long after. It soon becomes clear that the new cases are
linked in some way to Bone 12, the case that in many ways ruined Miss Hortense’s life and has dogged her ever since, and she is plunged into the murky, dangerous underbelly of Bigglesweigh once again, determined to get answers to old and new mysteries before anyone else gets hurt. She is a woman who “is going to step in and
provide justice for this community who can’t get it for themselves. Who, for whatever reason, are excluded from that system”, says Pennant, who decided to turn her hand to novel writing after the tour for her play Seeds was cancelled due to Covid-19: “That just ignited me.”
W
This is an opportunity for me to try and highlight the Windrush generation as a community and everything that they have brought to the now
“I saw Miss Hortense, I saw the Pardner
network and that community and I understood them. I wanted them to be represented in the complexity of their lives,” Pennant says. “So I think the community came first for me, but then it wasn’t hard for me to explore their community through crime. “Actually, I think it was almost necessary in
the sense that the community comes from a place that is not all sunshine and roses. And I wanted to explore what the darker parts of that community might be. I felt like cosy crime was the perfect format for me to do that, because I could both explore the darkness of the crime that is underneath the surface, but also there is
hile the story is dark, the joy and the humour of the community is never far away, expressed in patois, which is often very funny,
or the recipes Miss Hortense makes: black cake, bulla cake, coco fritters, gungo peas soup, gizadas. “It was a no- brainer for me that I would incorporate [patois] into the book, because I love the language,” Pennant says. “It’s so playful, funny and colourful.” Even for people unfamiliar with it, “I think, if you can understand the rhythm of the language initially, you can begin to understand,” she says. A Murder for Miss Hortense is the first in a
series, and Pennant is currently in the process of writing book two. While the details for the follow-up are under wraps, “What I’ll say is that there are so many stories for me to tell in this fictional community that I’ve created. It’s been a joy being with the characters again. They have so much to say. And there is history there, there are a number of bones there that are historic, but there’s also what’s happening now,” she says. “One of the themes in this book is how the
past relates to the future and the present, and I’m just really enjoying exploring that, because I think it’s really important that we don’t lose sight of the past. In my community now, what I’m hearing a lot and what I know about is that a lot of the Windrush generation are dying out. All of their stories, all of that richness is unfor- tunately dying with them. And so this is an opportunity, I think, for me to try and highlight them as a community and everything that they have brought to the now.”
07
GEMMA DAY
Books Author Profile
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