A Moment With…Isabella Muir

Published January 30, 2023 | By Laura

I am delighted to be welcoming Isabella Muir and the blog tour for her book, A Notable Omission to Novel Kicks today.

A 1970s debate on equality is overshadowed by a deadly secret…

Spring 1970. Sussex University is hosting a debate about equality for women. But when one of the debating group goes missing, attention turns away from social injustice to something more sinister.

It seems every one of the group has something to hide, and when a second tragedy occurs, two of the delegates – amateur sleuth Janie Juke, and reporter Libby Frobisher – are prepared to make themselves unpopular to flush out the truth. Who is lying and why?

Alongside the police investigation, Janie and Libby are determined to prise answers from the tight-lipped group, as they find themselves in a race against time to stop another victim being targeted.

In A Notable Omission we meet Janie at the start of a new decade. When we left Janie at the end of The Invisible Case she was enjoying her new found skills and success as an amateur sleuth. Here we meet her a few months later, stealing a few days away from being a wife and mother, attending a local conference on women’s liberation to do some soul-searching…

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A Notable Omission is the fourth novel in the Janie Juke series, crimes and mysteries set during 1969 and 1970. Here Isabella Muir provides some insight into what attracted her to this particular historical period…

Delving into the past

When I first conjured up Janie Juke I knew that her story had to be set in the 1960s. It’s an era I have always loved. My older brother and sister both grew up during the sixties, so I’m lucky to have first-hand memories of all kinds of wild events. My sister was at the Rolling Stones concert on Hastings Pier in 1964 when tickets probably cost a few shillings. My brother was a real mod, with a scooter, and the ‘mod’ uniform of a Parka jacket, with fur-lined hood. He didn’t take part in the crazy event in 1964, when 5,000 mods and rockers planned to storm Hastings sea front to create the ‘Second Battle of Hastings’ and the police had to fly in extra officers to control the crowds, but he may well have inevitably watched from the sidelines.

I remember sitting gazing at my sister when she put on her makeup before a night out. She aimed for that ‘bare-faced’ sixties look with just a touch of face powder. All the focus was on the eyes, with white or sometimes bright blue eyeshadow and thick black mascara and eye-liner, trying to emulate the sixties model, Twiggy. She would spend hours back-combing her hair into a bouffant style and then use oceans of hair spray to keep it just perfect.

When we first met Janie in The Tapestry Bag it’s 1969. Twiggy is still very much on the scene, but hairstyles were changing from a manicured look, to Janie’s more casual style of long, loose hair, pulled back with a headband made from ribbons or scarves. Mary Quant brought hot pants, mini skirts and plastic macs to the fashion scene, which would have soon travelled down from the King’s Road, Chelsea into boutiques in and around the imaginary Sussex seaside resort of Tamarisk Bay.

My historical research hasn’t only focused on the swinging sixties. In the second and third books in the series Janie looks back to the Second World War in an attempt to solve the mysteries, giving me the chance to read widely on how family life was affected during those war years.

The second book in the series, Lost Property, Hugh Furness, one of Janie’s library customers enlists her help. Hugh was an RAF pilot in the Second World War. He was stationed at ‘Longmere’ an RAF base modelled on RAF Tangmere, a place close to where I live. Some of the pilots based at Tangmere were involved with the Special Operations Executive, flying brave souls into France to help the French resistance. Tangmere is now a Military Aviation Museum and I was grateful for the advice and feedback from one of the museum’s Trustees to ensure all the details were accurate.

Italy and Italians feature in the third novel in the series, The Invisible Case. In particular Anzio, a favoured seaside resort for Italian holidaymakers, about an hour from Rome, a place I have visited many times. Anzio is the present-day home town of Luigi, but also the location for a key part of the plot, when we return to the war-torn Anzio of 1944. I am half Italian, so was able to enlist the help of my Italian cousins when researching day-to-day life in wartime Italy. For me the wonderful aroma of Italian coffee is synonymous with all the marvellous family holidays I had in Rome, but during the wartime real coffee was rarely found. I fleshed out these first-hand memories with plenty of online searching, as well as reading books about Italy during the war.

In the opening chapters of The Invisible Case we meet Janie’s Aunt Jessica travelling from Rome to return to her home town of Tamarisk Bay, after nine years exploring Europe. As I wrote the opening scenes I was there with Jessica on that long train journey from Rome, which was a trip I did many times with my family. Again, first-hand memories helped me to picture the scene, with all the smells, sights and sounds of Roma Termini – Rome’s central train station.

And now, in A Notable Omission, we have moved on to Easter 1970. The story centres around a conference on equal rights for women and in fact, although there was no such conference held at Sussex University, one was held in Oxford. The Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in the late 1960s and held their first conference over several days in late February and early March 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford University. Some six hundred delegates attended, including some men, who, it is reported, were committed to the movement, hoping for greater social equality for their daughters. In the original conference the recording equipment had to be borrowed. There was no heating and delegates sat in their coats. Nevertheless, the conference was hailed as a great success and the movement went on to organise several more events over subsequent years.

It’s been great fun delving into the past. The more I discover about those years the more ideas for future stories pop into my head!

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About Isabella Muir –

Isabella is never happier than when she is immersing herself in the sights, sounds and experiences of family life in southern England in past decades – specifically those years from the Second World War through to the early 1970s. Researching all aspects of life back then has formed the perfect launch pad for her works of fiction. It was during two happy years working on and completing her MA in Professional Writing when Isabella rekindled her love of writing fiction and since then she has gone on to publish seven novels, six novellas and two short story collections.

This latest novel, A Notable Omission, is the fourth book in her successful Sussex Crime Mystery series, featuring young librarian and amateur sleuth, Janie Juke. The early books in the series are set in the late 1960s in the fictional seaside town of Tamarisk Bay, where we meet Janie, who looks after the mobile library. She is an avid lover of Agatha Christie stories – in particular Hercule Poirot. Janie uses all she has learned from the Queen of Crime to help solve crimes and mysteries. This latest novel in the series is set along the south coast in Brighton in early 1970, a time when young people were finding their voice and using it to rail against social injustice.

As well as four novels, there are six novellas in the series, set during the Second World War, exploring some of the back story to the Tamarisk Bay characters.

Isabella’s love of Italy shines through all her work and, as she is half-Italian, she has enjoyed bringing all her crime novels to an Italian audience with Italian translations, which are very well received.

Isabella has also written a second series of Sussex Crimes, set in the sixties, featuring retired Italian detective, Giuseppe Bianchi, who is escaping from tragedy in Rome, only to arrive in the quiet seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, to come face-to-face with it once more.

Isabella’s standalone novel, The Forgotten Children, deals with the emotive subject of the child migrants who were sent to Australia – again focusing on family life in the 1960s, when the child migrant policy was still in force.

Say hello to Isabella via her website, Facebook and Twitter.

A Notable Omission, a Janie Juke mystery was released by Outset Publishing in January 2023. Click to buy on Amazon UK and Amazon US.