Alex Hay's debut novel, the lighthearted heist story The Housekeepers, was an Indie Next Pick. His second novel, The Queen of Fives, a cheeky story of the collision of con artists and royals, will be published by Graydon House/HarperCollins on January 21, 2025. Hay lives in London.
How did your academic study of history fuel your imagination--in particular, an interest in this time period and the depiction of strong women such as Quinn and Tor?
The main thrust of my degree was the late medieval and Renaissance period, and my dissertation looked at the political levers available to women at the early Tudor court. So there's definitely a theme here about female power-brokering in male-dominated settings.
But I think my affinity with the 19th century was really sparked even earlier than that. My childhood reading was filled with books like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and in my teens I inhaled Victorian triple-deckers like Vanity Fair--there's nobody better than Becky Sharp for navigating a lethal drawing room. Sensation fiction like The Woman in White was a big influence, of course. I also adored Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell--Lady Harriet Cumnor remains one of my favorite troubleshooting, horseback-riding characters in fiction. All grist to the mill, I suspect!
Various London properties have major roles in both novels. To what extent do you think of architecture as providing inspiration for plot? Do settings serve almost as memory palaces where you can watch scenes unfold?
You have lit on precisely how I work! I start by gluing together setting and story concept, often with not much more than a sense of mood or texture.
In The Queen of Fives, I knew I wanted to write a con that would move between a crumbling house in Spitalfields, East London, and a sumptuous red-brick mansion in an exclusive corner of Mayfair. So I wrote my way into both houses, twisting through the back streets of Spitalfields to find "The Château," the headquarters of Quinn Le Blanc, my con-woman protagonist. I consulted Charles Booth's 19th-century poverty maps and picked through old editions of the Survey of London to build a sense of her income, next-door neighbors, and prior landlords. Then I followed the same process for the high Gothic mansion on the opposite side of town. You peel open the doors, investigating the people within, and trust your subconscious to watch the drama unfold.
How did you arrive at the book's five-day structure? Was it modeled on a play?
There were actually a couple of practical considerations going on here. I thought it would be fun for me--and the reader--to give Quinn a rather strict and censorious rulebook, to provide a sort of warped moral code giving depth and irony and meaning to her actions. The number five has all sorts of symbolic resonances in literature and culture--the five-act structure in classical drama, as you say; the multiple historical meanings of pentagrams; and my ingenious editor spotted that the five of hearts is considered the marriage card in cartomancy--perfect symbolism for a con focused on tricking a duke into marriage in order to lift his fortune.
With all this in the mix, it made sense to me to compress the action to five days to keep it nice and tight. I enjoyed the challenge of asking, How on earth is Quinn going to trick the Duke of Kendal into marriage in less than a week? What are the five "levels" of her game? How will she move across her chessboard, deploy different maneuvers to sweep her obstacles aside? And what would happen if someone was planning their own grand counter-game against her?
Did you always picture yourself writing about criminal dynasties? Are you comfortable being classed as a mystery author, or are you indifferent to genre designations?
I just love writing about big houses and bad families! I'll have to speak to a psychologist to work out exactly where the motivation springs from, because I grew up quite happily as an only child living in an apartment with a single mother. And yet every time I start writing a book, I find myself constructing an opulent building filled with dangerous people.
Yes, I feel unutterably proud any time I'm classed as a mystery author. Suspense is a critical skill, one I'm always trying to hone. One of the authors I admire most in the world is Ruth Rendell, a crime writer who left behind the most extraordinary body of literature--and I actually think it's her use of genre expectations that makes her work so transcendent, so cathartic and unsettling. This is a rich field and I'm proud to be working in it.
Reviews often liken your work to Downton Abbey because of the upstairs-downstairs setup and the possibility of characters bridging that divide. Is it a comparison you're irked by or weary of? Why do you feel this situation still enthralls readers and viewers?
Ooh, no, I love this comparison! Downton is iconic, of course, and I adored the crispness and slipperiness of its precursor, Gosford Park, too. I also grew up watching Upstairs, Downstairs. Since most of us do NOT have a large staff of servants tending to our every whim, I think there's something escapist and horrifying, frankly, about the idea of paying people to live in your home and observe your every move. It would make my skin crawl. And what happens when the group below stairs try to grab power from the folk on the floors above? This question feels rich in opportunity for tension, irony, double-dealing, game playing, betrayal, humor and fun, and I try to throw all these ingredients into my books.
Your editor describes you as "one of the most charming people I have ever met" and your publicist calls you "the loveliest." Is there a contradiction between being a nice person in real life and writing about things like theft, double-crossing, and fraud?
This is so kind! I feel the same about them! But ha--perhaps the answer is that we ALL have lovely, delicious, devious, diabolical thoughts lurking at the back of our heads, but we just regulate them awfully well!
Seriously, my impulse is to write about people who want to right the wrongs they see around them, who craft their own (offbeat) morality to justify their actions and design their audacious schemes accordingly. Stories set in the late 1890s and early 1900s provide fertile ground for this: a sense of old rules dissolving, change coming. Rip-roaring robberies and cunning confidence schemes provide a way to ask: What does this person really want? How far are they willing to go to get it? And who will they become by the end of the book? This to me is the joy of reading and writing fiction. --Rebecca Foster