about - maggiepeck

For most of us who lived through the 1960’s it is hard to recognise the ‘Swinging Sixties’ of myth and cinema and, really, outside of the fashionable part of London it was still a country of post war hardship and deprivation.

But it was a decade of unparalleled opportunity for women with the introduction of the pill, the number of women entering the workplace and, like it or not, the mini skirt which gave the younger generation their own distinctive look.

I was born in 1956 and so the 70’s was my decade but I had older sisters and I felt the excitement and also the uncertainties, that these changes brought.

I wanted to explore these in my Annabel Staple series which I set in the middle of the 1960’s, with a young heroine, taking on a most unusual job for a women at that time - as a private detective.

Class was a much bigger issue in the 1960’s than it is now. Annabel is working class/lower middle class and she is catapulted by her inheritance into a world of ‘old money’ and landed gentry with results that were fun to explore.

For anyone born in the 50’s and 60’s there were very real links to the wars. My grandfathers both fought in WW1 and my father in WW2. All survived, thankfully, though my maternal grandfather suffered from shell shock which affected the rest of his life. I was aware, growing up, of the many unmarried women of my great aunts’ generation.

If you are wondering whether I based Annabel on myself, there are aspects of me there. I too could eat pretty much whatever I liked at that age and not put on any weight. (It was a severe shock to me when that happy state ended.) I too preferred simple food and clothes you didn’t mind getting dirty. But Annabel is far, far more level headed and sensible than I was at that age. Losing one’s parents at the age off eighteen as she did, would force that, I think.

Annabel grew up in West London and the house that she inherited was in Hertfordshire. I grew up in Worcestershire, spent my twenties living and working in London, then lived for twenty years in Hertfordshire before moving to Suffolk. I have used my memories and experiences of London and Hertfordshire in my books – and I look forward to basing one in Suffolk at some stage.

I have always loved reading and especially the golden age of detective fiction, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and of course, the great Agatha Christie.

I also love the humour of Georgette Heyer’s Georgian romances, and the family saga type mysteries of Catherine Gaskin and Mary Stewart.

Turning to the modern, or more modern, era, authors I read include P.D James, Ann Cleeves, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, Donna Leon, Dick Frances, Anthony Horovitz, Sjöwall & Wahlöö, David Baldacci, C.J. Box and Michael Connelly.