Anna Lee Huber- "Murder Most Fair"
Dear Reader:
The inspiration for Murder Most Fair in my Verity Kent Mystery series came from a fortuitous dive down one of the rabbit holes which always seem to appear while one is doing research, when I allowed myself to take a detour onto the MI6—British Intelligence Service’s website.
It was there that I stumbled across a comment about the women who had served in British Intelligence during the First World War. This brought me up short because I, like most people, hadn’t known that women had worked for the Secret Service during that earlier war. I’d known they did their heroic part in World War II, but not its preceding conflict.
This excited me, for I’d long been fascinated with World War I, and I’d wanted to write a series around that conflict, but I couldn’t find the right hook. There were stories with heroes and heroines who were soldiers, nurses, and ambulance drivers, or posted to the home front, but I’d not yet read anything with a female spy as the protagonist. There were several series with female agents set a decade or more later, particularly during WWII, but not WWI.
Once I began to research, I discovered a treasure trove of information about the thousands—yes, thousands—of women who worked for British Intelligence in Britain and behind enemy lines during the Great War. These women had done their bit and then, for the most part, kept quiet, as they’d been instructed to do.
It wasn’t until MI6 began declassifying some of their records that those still living were able to tell their stories. These valiant women were the inspiration behind Verity. I wanted to honor them by creating a heroine worthy of them. One who could borrow from their exploits and shine a light on their tremendous accomplishments.
--Anna Lee Huber
Anna Lee Huber is the Daphne award-winning author of the national bestselling Lady Darby Mysteries and the Verity Kent Mysteries. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in music and minored in psychology. She currently resides in Indiana with her family and is hard at work on her next novel. Visit her online at www.annaleehuber.com.