A Traffic Jam Changed Her Life

Jacqueline Winspear was mired in London gridlock back in 2001 when her fictional detective, Maisie Dobbs, popped into her head. “Stoplights were at red as far as I could see,” the novelist remembers. “In my mind’s eye I saw a woman walk up the old wooden escalator at the Warren Street underground station, dressed in the garb of the mid-1920s. She spoke to the newspaper vendor, then made her way along the street to a building, where she took an envelope with two keys from her bag ... I was shaken out of my daydream by honking from cars stuck behind me. I could not wait to get home to start writing.” Maisie Dobbs — nurse turned private eye — now has a devoted following (Hillary Clinton is a fan), and the 14th book in the series, “To Die but Once,” debuts at No. 5 on the fiction list.

Winspear, who sets the books largely in the period between the two world wars, was drawn to that era from a young age. “As a small child, I was aware my grandfather had difficulty breathing, that he would often be in pain — and we had to be quiet around him,” she recalls. “My questions were always met with the same answer: ‘Granddad was wounded in the Great War.’ Not injured. Not hurt. He was wounded, and there was something in the word that seemed to suggest something deeper, a wounding that went to the very soul of a person.”

As she grew older, Winspear says, “I became more and more interested in the ‘war to end all wars’ and its impact on ordinary people, especially the women of that generation.” Her research led back to her grandparents. “I have always wondered how it might have felt for my grandfather, wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, to see his sons joining the army in World War II, and my grandmother, partially blinded in a munitions factory explosion, when her children were called up for military service. I wanted to move my characters through time to explore that experience, all underpinned by a mystery, that archetypal journey through chaos to resolution.”

Winspear doesn’t outline before she writes. When she began the first Maisie Dobbs book, she stuck three huge Post-its on the wall. “On one I marked the major landing points in the story. On another I kept track of characters and on the third I noted anything I didn’t know but needed to know to develop the story,” she says. “I have kept to that system ever since. My landing points give me direction, yet leave room to dance with the moment — permission to go down an unplanned byway if I am inspired to do so.”