Author Q&A
Q & A with Margaret Mallory, author of Knight of Pleasure, the second book in the All the King’s Men series.
Q: What inspired you to trade your legal career for writing medieval romance novels? Why?
MM: The short answer is that I went into a midlife crisis after two bosses in a row died young and a third got fired. I could have done a lot worse than to come out of it as a novelist.
Q: How has your extensive years in the law affected your writing?
MM: I was a policy wonk; West Wing was my kind of TV show. Since I like political intrigue, you’ll find the medieval version in my books: conspiracies against the king and wily bishops politicking behind the scenes. On occasion, I’ll throw in an issue around property inheritance or marriage laws. By the way, the best legal status for a female in the middle ages was to be a widowed noblewoman with money.
Q: You make the point in your website that you love history, so what role does that play in the All the King’s Men trilogy?
MM: The biggest challenge is to include enough history—and the right bits—to give the reader a sense of being in a different time and place, without being boring. I love to make real historical figures come alive as secondary characters in my books. In my first book, for example, I make my heroine a childhood friend of Prince Harry (later Henry V) and have her taken hostage by the Welsh rebel whose descendent will many years later start the Tudor dynasty. In my third book, I make Henry V’s young widow, a French princess, a close friend of my fictional heroine. The widowed queen begins her true-life affair with Owen Tudor, her Clerk of the Wardrobe, in that book. (If I made this up, no one would believe it.)
Q: You also mention that you visited Alnwick Castle in Great Britain, which is used as a scene in Knight of Pleasure. What is the significance of this castle? Any other momentous places that have made it into your trilogy?
MM: I use several important medieval castles throughout the trilogy. In the first one, Knight of Desire, my heroine spends time in three of the fortresses built by Edward I as a “Ring of Iron” around Wales. Caen Castle in Normandy is the setting for a number of scenes in book 2, Knight of Pleasure. The prologue of Knight of Passion, book 3, is set in the Louvre in Paris, while the English castles of Windsor, Westminster, Eltham and Leicester figure prominently in other parts of the book.
Q: Aside from travel, what other modes of research have you sought out?
MM: I do on-line research, gets books from libraries, and buy a few books on-line. For my third book, websites for the City of London and London Bridge Museums have been very helpful, as well as a book I bought on medieval architecture.
Q: What would you like readers to walk away with after reading your books?
MM: I want to sweep my readers away to another time and place. Women need pleasurable escape reading. I want my book to help them forget about the hassles of their day and to leave them with a warm and satisfying happy ending.