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Ever wondered what it would have been like if Jane Austen had turned her hand to murder?

Murder at Mansfield Park takes Austen’s masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie. Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain of events that leads inexorably to violence and death.

Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions raised by Jane Austen’s text. Austen’s Mansfield Park is radically different from any of her other works, and much of the pleasure of Lynn Shepherd’s novel lies in the way it takes the characters and episodes in the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful book, with a new heroine at its centre – a heroine who owes far more to the lively and spirited Elizabeth Bennet, than the dreary and insipid Fanny Price.

A treat for Austen lovers and murder mystery aficionados alike.

Q. When did you start writing and why?

LS: Like most people I wrote a lot as a child, but I didn’t start writing seriously until I went freelance in 2000. That gave me the chance to juggle my workload and find some space for writing. I’d always had an ambition to write a novel and see it published, but I knew from the start what a mountain that would be to climb!

Q. What usually comes first for you – character(s) or plot?

LS: Definitely plot. I think if you write any sort of mystery or thriller then the driving momentum of the book has to come from the events. Murder at Mansfield Park was a slightly unusual case anyway, because I was starting from the premise of Austen’s novel, so I had a cast of her characters already. Though as anyone who’s read my book will know, I have a lot of fun playing about with them and giving them a twist!

Q. Of all your own characters, which one is your favorite?

LS: Charles Maddox, the thief taker, is the only character 100% my own, but I think he’d be my favourite in any case. I love the way he straddles the social class he came from and the one he now works within, exploiting the conventions of genteel society as one of his most effective techniques to find out the truth. I see him very much as a prototype Sherlock Holmes, using ‘logic and observation’ to solve his cases.

Q. Which was the most difficult to write and why?

LS: I think my heroine Mary Crawford was the hardest to write. I had to make her sympathetic, as well as a ‘knowing eye’ from which the reader could observe the events going on at the Park. The equivalent character in Mansfield Park is not presented positively at all – in fact I’ve always thought Austen loads the dice against her – so I had to overcome any resistance my reader might have to ‘my’ Mary. Fanny Price, by contrast, was very easy to write – it’s always so much fun writing a deliciously unpleasant villain!

Q. Was there an author who had an important impact on your writing?

LS: Jane Austen in the case of this book, of course, and the clarity of her prose is an inspiration to any aspiring novelist. In a more general way I’ve always been a huge admirer of AS Byatt – long before the success of Possession. I love the density of the writing in novels like Still Life, and the fact that she’s not afraid to write an unashamedly ‘clever’ book.

Q. Do you prefer writing series or standalones?

LS: My next book brings back Charles Maddox, so I suppose you could say I’m writing a series, though the subject matter, the setting, and the language are very different. Perhaps the best way to see it is as a standalone that happens to feature a character from a previous book!

Q. The old saying goes…”write what you know.” What do you do when you don’t know something?

LS: I know a lot of writers love the research aspect of a book, and having an academic background myself I can certainly see the appeal of hours digging about in libraries or on the web. However, research can be a bane as well as a boon – I’ve read many books where you can tell at once that there’s been a lot of prior research, because the author is desperate use as much of it as possible, to justify the time spent doing it. As a result you get these great chunks of half-digested research that stick out like sore thumbs. I always do the minimum research upfront, so that the research serves the story, not the other way round. And then I go back and find out what I need to know to fill the gaps. I am a real stickler for getting the details right.

Q. How long did it take to sell your first book?

LS: A few months I think. It wasn’t easy because it was in early 2009, in the depths of the recession, when selling an unknown debut author really was an uphill struggle.

Q. Do you write full time or squeeze it in when you can get to it?

LS: I juggle with the ‘day job’, which is as a freelance copywriter for companies. I do so much of it I sometimes think I should have ‘juggler’ on my passport!

Q. Before you start a manuscript, do you outline? If so, how detailed do you get?

LS: I always have a very detailed synopsis, and I usually stick pretty close to it – though sometimes your characters will surprise you. I had no idea – for example –that ‘my’ Henry Crawford would turn out to have a very shadowy past…

Q. What is the most difficult part of writing?

LS: Getting the idea in the first place. I know some writers have loads of ideas and then struggle with the marathon of actually completing the book. I’m the other way round. It takes me a long time to think of and then develop my idea, but after that the writing part isn’t usually so hard. Probably because I’ve been working to deadlines as a writer for so long, I’m just used to just ‘getting on with it’.

Q. Do you have a critique partner or group? If so, are they brutally honest or politely honest?

LS: Not a formal one. My agent has fantastic literary judgment, and is always a really useful sounding-board. But I don’t send him things on a weekly or chapter-by-chapter basis. My husband is also really helpful, but again, I only tend to give him the book when it’s in first draft.

Q. Because we’re molded by events in our lives, we all bring personal baggage to the stories we write. Does that help or hinder you?

LS: To be honest I don’t think my own life impinges on my books that much. Writing historical fiction always creates a degree of distance. I suppose we draw on our experiences at some level all the time, but I can’t think of any overt examples.

Q. What genre (outside of your own) would you like to try writing?

LS: That’s a good question! I might try my hand at a contemporary story one day, but I don’t have any hankering to do anything drastically different, like YA or science fiction!

Q. What genre do you prefer to read?

LS: You said ‘write what you know’ just now, and I definitely ‘write what I read’. Classic English fiction and classic detective fiction. I then try to write books that bring the two together!

Q. On a more personal note, what were you like as a kid? Tell us one of your favorite childhood memories.

LS: Very precocious I think! I was Gabriel in a school Nativity play when I was about six – though I think it was because I was blonde and the tallest in the class, rather than because I had a particularly angelic character!

Q. If I asked one of your family members to tell me something about you, what would be the first story they’d think of?

LS: I think my father would probably tell you that I taught myself to read at the age of three. It rather sets the tone for everything that followed doesn’t it!

I live near Oxford, England, with my husband Simon. Murder at Mansfield Park is my first novel, but I’ve been a professional copywriter for the last ten years.

I studied English at Oxford in the 1980s, and went back to do a doctorate in 2003. By that time I’d spent 15 years in business, first in the City, and later in PR. I’d always wanted to be a writer, and going freelance in 2000 gave me the time I needed to see if I could make that dream into a reality. Ten years and two and a half unpublished novels later, it’s finally happened.

Find Lynn Shepherd: WEBSITE – BLOG – –

Buy Murder at Mansfield Park: – BOOK DEPOSITORY