The longer version:
The granddaughter of children’s author Lillie V. Albrecht (author of historicals Deborah Remembers, The Spinning Wheel Secret, Hannah's Hessian, The Grist Mill Secret, and Susanna's Candlestick), Susanne Alleyn definitely doesn’t write for children, unless, like her, they have found guillotines, high drama, and the French Revolution fascinating since the age of ten or so.
Susanne was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in Massachusetts and New York City. After earning a B.F.A. in theater from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Susanne eventually came to the conclusion that, as an actor and singer, she was quite a good writer, and that sending out manuscripts to editors and agents was still easier on the nerves than going to auditions. (She can, nevertheless, still sing a high C when requested.) Having been unwholesomely fascinated by the French Revolution since she read the Classics Illustrated comic-book version of A Tale of Two Cities, she set out to write about it. Her debut novel, A Far Better Rest, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities (what else?) from the point of view of Sydney Carton, was published in 2000.
She had never considered writing mysteries, however, until she suddenly found herself creating a historical mystery plot suggested by an actual series of murders committed in Paris in the early 1800s. Police agent Aristide Ravel made his first appearance in Game of Patience and returned in A Treasury of Regrets, both set in Paris in the Directoire period of 1796-97.
The third mystery in the series, The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, a prequel set just before the Revolution, is now in bookstores, and Palace of Justice, the fourth Aristide Ravel novel, set in the middle of the Reign of Terror, will go into print in November, 2010. Susanne intends to cover the entire Revolutionary period in future novels if her publisher lets her.
She is also the owner, manager, secretary, bookkeeper, shipping department, and janitor of the online bookstore Tricolor Books/Academy Books (link at right), specializing in out-of-print, rare, and academic books on European history. She would like to add that she speaks French very badly.
Susanne and her three cats live in Albany, NY.
The short version:
Susanne Alleyn was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in western Massachusetts and New York City, earning a bachelor's of fine arts in theater from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has been researching and writing about the French Revolution since her teens and is currently doing final revisions on the fourth Aristide Ravel historical mystery. Susanne lives in Albany, NY.
Q. Describe your latest project.
A. My new novel, Palace of Justice, is the fourth historical mystery featuring Aristide Ravel, freelance investigator and agent of the Paris police (please don’t call him a spy) before and during the French Revolution. Palace takes place during the Reign of Terror, in the autumn of 1793, just as Marie-Antoinette was going on trial and Parisian politics became more and more ideological, violent, and ruthless. The Terror, when Paris was full of spies, conspirators, and all kinds of foreign adventurers, and rife with threats of invasion, civil unrest, and political intrigue and infighting, will keep a police agent endlessly busy!
Q. Why write a novel -- five novels, in fact -- set in such a grim, violent period of history as the French Revolution?
A. OK, this is the part where I take a deep breath and try, once again, to explain. Most people’s knowledge of the period begins and ends with A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Pimpernel, both of which are stupendously exaggerated depictions of the “horrors” of the Revolution (or rather the Terror). In fact the French Revolution was viewed by a lot of people, for at least the first couple of years, as the greatest event in the history of civilization, and it was really the beginning of our modern world. Radical ideas like social justice, equality under the law, and representative democracy were not entirely new in the West, of course; but when France -- the biggest, richest, most intellectually sophisticated, and most powerful country in Europe -- started to put such ideas into practice, and shake up the system of monarchy, aristocracy, and privilege that had governed Europe for centuries, everyone had to sit up and pay attention whether they wanted to or not.
Q. You’re wandering from the point here, Ms. Alleyn. What do you find so particularly fascinating about the period?
A. The sheer theatricality of it, I suppose. As an ex-actor, I’m drawn to dramatic situations and personalities, and the Revolution is full of them. Suddenly a whole society was breaking up and re-forming itself, and all these incredibly complex and gifted people, who without the Revolution would probably have lived long, dull, comfortable lives as lawyers and career army officers, were throwing themselves into public life. And some of them, fundamentally decent people, ended up caring so much about their ideals and how they thought the Revolution and the French Republic should be managed that they were willing to kill anyone who disagreed with them, including their best friends.
Q. Will you be writing more novels about Ravel?
A. Absolutely. Aristide will, I hope, have a long and colorful career as an agent of the police.
Q. Just how long have you been interested in this period?
A. It’s OK; you can say “obsessed,” you know. Over twenty-five years now, since I was about seventeen. I began by reading the basic pop history books about the period, which grabbed me enough so that, during college, I went on to original sources -- memoirs, period newspapers -- and the more academic histories, and never stopped.
Q. Do you enjoy movies set in the French Revolution?
A. I love them all, even the majority that are just incredibly, hilariously, inaccurate and bad, bad, bad.
Q. What mistakes annoy you the most in poorly researched French Revolution movies?
A. Don’t get me started. But if I had to specify one thing, it would probably be the guillotines. They never do manage to get them right.
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