St Leonards' very own Victorian lady detective

Hannah introduced Violet Hamilton in the first book No Life For A Lady. Now in the second, Violet is developing her skills as a detective, solving mysteries and unveiling scandals.

When the body of a local woman is found on the tourist railway, Violet’s efforts to investigate are blocked at every turn – in a tale which comes promised as “Jane Austen meets Sherlock Holmes in a delightful mystery of manners.”

Hannah said: “The first book is about my Victorian heroine’s journey to becoming a detective and finding her missing mother. This latest one is about her becoming a detective.

“It's all set in Hastings and St Leonards. I live in London and I'm originally from Edinburgh but I studied journalism in Hastings and St Leonards about 30 years ago. I was there for about five months in the early 90s and I had to cover a patch in Hastings. We had to come back with two stories every week. I didn't work as a journalist for very long. I quite quickly went into PR and I've worked in PR for quite a long time. I've worked for lots of museums and art galleries and so on but when I was writing this book I just remembered Hastings and St Leonards and I thought of them as the perfect Victorian setting. When I was there in the early 90s there were crumbling Victorian buildings but you could still get the grandeur and splendour of them. You could still sense that.

“I first went back there about ten years ago for weekends and day trips and there is a lovely Victorian themed guest house there. And I do think the place has improved since I was there. When I was there, there was that 1930s swimming pool which had got a bit run down. It certainly feels that there's more life and fun to the place now. There seems to be a lot of spirit and a greater sense of community and a lot of positivity. Once you start peeling back the layers, then you sense what an interesting place it is and I've been trying to include lots of places in the books that are still there.”

As for her heroine: “The book is set in about 1897 and she is a funny, feisty, cheeky, slightly naive heroine. In the first book she is terrible at domesticity and she's never going to make a proper Victorian heroine. But in the first book she's looking for her missing mother. She's completely naive and she doesn't even know what goes on in the bedroom. It's a funny book and there are lots of laughs. But in the second book she is more established as a detective with the man she is also engaged to. She is making herself independent and learning how to be a detective which means learning how to shoot and how to ride a bicycle. I would say that she's very good at listening. She throws herself headlong into everything and needs to calm down. There is no fear to her.”

At the moment there are only two books in the series. Hannah's third book will be something completely different: “I don't know if there will be a third book in the series. We will just have to wait and see how well the second book goes down.”