It gives me great pleasure to welcome the the lovely Nancy Jardine to my blog today. Her book Topaz Eyes caught my eye and I wanted to get the background inspiration for such an amazing adventure!
Welcome Nancy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
Hello, Anne-Marie. Thank you for the opportunity to visit your blog. I aim to ‘get out’ a lot more this year so your invitation is much appreciated!
Tell us the basic premise of your novel?
Topaz Eyes has been called a ‘fabulously dangerous quest for a precious collection of emerald jewellery’ that once belonged to a Mughal Emperor. It’s also been called ‘ a deep plot of intrigue across Europe’ and beyond. The novel centres on a fictitious European family of third generation cousins. In their hunt for hugely expensive missing jewellery that the family once owned, some cousins are nice but others are downright nasty, even murderous.
Why did you choose the locations you chose and do they hold any real life significance to you?
All are personally significant in some form. The story begins in the beautiful university town of Heidelberg, Germany, chosen because my daughter spent a year at the university and I visited her there. Keira Drummond, my main female character, also spent time at Heidelberg University – isn’t that an amazing coincidence (*wink, wink*)? Some of the action takes place in Amsterdam, Holland, because I lived in Holland for three years and adore the country. I won’t give away any spoilers but one of the complex relationships in the story mirrors a situation I found myself in when I lived in Holland. Vienna features just because it’s a fabulous place to be a tourist. I decided that one cousin had to be American so I used locations in Minnesota, USA, which I’ve also been to. Keira Drummond is an Edinburgh lass because I wanted a ‘Scottish’ element in the story.
What inspired this exciting adventurous novel?
Topaz Eyes is my second contemporary mystery that revolves around an ancestral theme. The first ‘Family Tree’ I invented for my mystery Monogamy Twist was a fairly simple one but when I started Topaz Eyes I wanted to create a much deeper mystery with a bigger cast of related characters who had a common purpose linking them together. I then had to think up an exceptionally absorbing reason for a bunch of third generation cousins to be on a murderous quest, family members who are essentially all strangers at the outset of the novel. The 1880s matriarch of the family is from an Amsterdam family who own a prestigious jewellery business. This meant I could have lots of contemporary action happen in different worldwide locations since her descendants end up scattered around after the Second World War. I mainly used my memories of the locations which meant only some up-to-date fact checking was necessary. I remember having a lot of laughs when I was creating the family tree and the incidents that happen in the story!
Did it take a lot of research to come up with the story behind the jewellery once owned by a Mughal Emperor?
My main research for this novel was about emerald collections, especially those originally owned by Mughal emperors. I’m fascinated that a piece of jewellery designed for a Mughal Emperor in 1580, 1680 or even 1780, could be completely different by 1880! I hadn’t really appreciated that designs created for a particular woman (wife or one of the many concubines) were rarely appropriate for another woman and that it was commonplace for the gems to be reset into new jewellery. That cemented a really deep mystery because if you don’t have many clues about what an item might currently look like, then how difficult is it to bring that collection together? Topaz Eyes ended up being a mystery within a mystery but you’ll have to read the story to uncover that connection!
If you could go on a global adventure with anyone (alive or dead) who would you choose?
I’m cheating here because although I write contemporary mysteries, I also write historical fiction. In Book 4 of my Celtic Fervour Series (unpublished), my main characters are mainly Celtic but there’s also General Gnaeus Julius Agricola. Agricola was the commander of the Ancient Roman army which marched all the way to north east Scotland in c. A.D. 84 and then they left without properly absorbing the area into the Ancient Roman Empire! The only reason we know this happened is because Agricola’s son-in-law – Cornelius Tacitus – wrote about Agricola’s military campaigns. I’d love to journey back to c. A.D. 95 and spend time in Rome because that’s probably when Tacitus was writing about Agricola’s exploits in northern Britannia (The Agricola was published in A.D. 96). That way I might get the true version of what happened! And…I’d love to describe to Tacitus what Rome is like today having visited there in 2016.
What are you working on next?
The big plan is to have Book 4 of my Celtic Fervour Series published in the spring (2018). After that I’ve got two projects already started that need a lot of work. The first is Book 2 of my Rubidium Time Travel Series- a Victorian adventure. The second is a family saga that begins in Scotland c. 1850 – Book 1 (of 3?) being another Victorian setting. Then in the fullness of time I’ll get back to Book 5 of my Celtic Fervour series…or maybe I should write that next? Who knows (**smiley face here**)
Nancy Jardine is a member of the Romantic Novelists Association, the Scottish Association of Writers, the Federation of Writers Scotland and the Historical Novel Society. She’s published by Crooked Cat Books and has delved into self publishing.
You can find her at these places:
Blog: http://nancyjardine.blogspot.co.uk Website: www.nancyjardineauthor.com/
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/XeQdkG & http://on.fb.me/1Kaeh5G
email: nan_jar@btinternet.com Twitter https://twitter.com/nansjar
Amazon Author page http://viewauthor.at/mybooksandnewspagehere
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5139590.Nancy_Jardine
Anne-Marie Ormsby 