Bestselling author Sarah Zettel’s pseudonym Darcie Wilde started out as a joke.
“In my career, I’ve run through a lot of pen names, mostly because they’ve gotten attached to a series that didn’t really take off. For a while, every time I started a new series, I was asked to put it under a new name. I assumed when the Rosalind Thorne series started, I was going to change names again. I thought since these were Regency romances, I’d do ‘Darcie’ for Mr. Darcy (the protagonist of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’) and ‘Wilde’ for Oscar Wilde (best known for his novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’). Of course, that’s the one that stuck, so be very careful what you do for a joke,” explained Zettel, of Washtenaw County, laughing.
Zettel and Downriver-based author Dianne Freeman will discuss and sign their latest novels, “The Heir” (Kensington $27) – written under the Wilde pseudonym – and “A Daughter’s Guide to Mothers and Murder” (Kensington $27), respectively, at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor on Wednesday, Aug. 27, at 6:30 p.m. as part of its “Historical Mystery Night” event. This event is free and open to the public.
“It’ll be exciting,” said Zettel. “The folks at Schuler really know how to put together an author pairing. They reached out to us both. Dianne and I are lunch buddies who love each other’s work. They asked, ‘Are you willing to sit down and talk together?’ We said, ‘Heck yeah!’”
A University of Michigan alumnus, Zettel has written nearly 50 books, 10 of which as Wilde. Her latest novel, “The Heir,” is the first in her new “Young Queen Victoria Mystery” series.
“I’m very excited about the new series,” said Zettel. “It’s my first new series in quite some time. I’ve been writing Rosalind Thorne books, but this is my first new historical mystery series, so I’m super excited to have that out in the world!”
Zettel explained how Queen Victoria – whose reign as Queen of Great Britain was 63 years – became the protagonist of her new series. It began as a conversation with her editor Wendy McCurdy.
“We were talking about a new series. We were talking about famous women in history. I told her I researched Queen Victoria for another project that never came about. I spoke about her childhood, which was very constrained, isolated, yet she became a fierce, independent woman,” recalled Zettel. “When people think of Queen Victoria, they think of her in mourning… as this very domestic, very quiet person. But as a young woman, she was fiercely independent, incredibly strong-minded, determined to learn everything she could about her job. She loved music and dancing. She was an artist. She was constantly writing letters. (Historians) estimate between her letters and her journals, she wrote about 60,000 million words during her lifetime. This is an incredibly interesting woman. Wendy suggested, ‘How about a mystery with her as the sleuth?’”
That led to the next question: How do you write a book with an actual royal princess solving murders?
“The problem with writer’s brain is as soon as you say ‘How?’ the other half of your brain says, ‘Well, like this.’ I already did a chunk of the research I needed to do and started doing a lot more after that,” said Zettel. “It started coming together rather quickly. I was fortunate that the Royal Collection Trust – which keeps the documents belonging to the Royal Family – had recently put all her childhood journals online, so I had access to them. It was through reading those I was able to look at the historical events and spaces between the events. I was able to look at these gaps and say, ‘Here’s where we put in the story. Here’s where we can put in things that were possible, probably, could’ve – you know, if you squint,’” she added with a laugh. “It was all of that.”
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To research “The Heir,” Zettel also read several books about Victoria. She also traveled to England and went to Kensington Palace.
“I got to pile on the research! I love an excuse to get obscure books out of the library!” she said.
According to Zettel, she has no plans to have Rosalind (the historical mystery series she also writes as Wilde) and Victoria meet.
“I’m thinking they will never meet. For one thing, I’m dealing with a large enough cast of characters at Kensington Palace. I think Rosalind will stay in her own world,” she said.
However, Zettel did offer a nugget of hope.
“Maybe – no promises – maybe, just maybe there’ll be a Christmas special, but that’s not being planned at this time,” she said.
Robin Agnew, who owned Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop in Ann Arbor (which closed in 2018) with her husband Jamie, hosted Zettel several times at her store. Agnew stated that “The Heir” may be her favorite novel Zettel has ever written.
“The writing and pacing are crisp and the character development seems to utilize all the things Wilde must have learned writing her other books. It’s exquisite,” said Agnew. “While this is a pretty familiar story to a history buff, like any good historical novelist, Wilde shines a new light on history, illuminating the facts with her perceptions of the characters in the story.”
Zettel spoke about the challenges of writing “The Heir.” One of her favorite sayings about writing is, “You never learn how to write books; you learn how to write this book.” For her, the process for every single book is slightly different. Part of that process is figuring out how it will come together for her.
“First, because they’re mysteries, you have to have a corpse! I have to know who’s dead and why they died. I have to have an idea of who did it and sometimes I find out that I’m wrong, which is very embarrassing,” she explained. “When writing a mystery, I like to have some idea of what the ending is because that gives me a target, so I can start arranging the pieces of story, so they point towards the target. After that, everything goes.”
She continued: “Sometimes, I have a whole bunch of notes, which can be considered an outline… Sometimes, I have a terrific scene for somewhere in the middle of the book and I get the scene down, then I sorta expand it out from there. With Victoria, I had an opening and knew exactly where to start. I was able to write pretty sequentially because I did have that opening scene. In that case, it took me a long time and looking at her diaries to figure out who was actually dead. I had the scene where she finds the body, but it took me a while to figure out who was dead.” She added with a laugh: “That was new and different!”
For questions or more information about “Historical Mystery Night” at Schuler Books, located at 2513 Jackson Ave. in the Westgate Shopping Center in Ann Arbor, call (734) 662-0600.
