Dark Days at the Beach Hotel by Francesca Capaldi - #GuestPost #blogtour

Today I am welcoming Francesca Capaldi on the blog to talk about her new book, Dark Days at the Beach Hotel.

But first, a little about the book...

The Blurb

Can she save the hotel... and her reputation?

Helen Bygrove is managing the hotel, now that her husband has been conscripted. Against all expectations, Helen and her team are doing marvellously, despite the shortages brought by war. Even the exacting Lady Blackmore agrees. But then the calm is shattered when poison pen letters are sent to prominent townsfolk and Helen finds herself the target of a police investigation. Is someone trying to ruin Helen, and the Beach Hotel? And can she rely on the handsome but taciturn Inspector Toshack to help her? When her husband, Douglas, is invalided out of the war he is determined to take back control of the hotel and things go from bad to worse.

How can she ever escape his bullying? Is she a fool to hope that she may have a second chance at love?

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Welcome Francesca. It's lovely to have you on the blog today.

When I started writing the timeline and ideas for Dark Days at the Beach Hotel, set in Littlehampton in World War One, I knew that I wanted it to be manageress Helen Bygrove’s story. Things were about to become a little darker at the hotel, not least of all because of Helen’s rather boorish and bossy husband, Douglas, who is the manager and owner of the hotel. Although the hotel really existed, all the characters in the Beach Hotel books are fictional (though there is the odd mention of living people).

Just before I embarked on planning this story, I read an intriguing book called The Littlehampton Libels, by Christopher Hilliard, which sets out a real-life story of libellous letters and wrongful arrests in the early 1920s. I started reading it for its period detail of the town, but it soon occurred to me that libellous letters would be a wonderful idea for the book, causing trouble and misdirections.

Although part of my storyline was inspired by this real-life case, it has nothing of the original story in it. The Beach Hotel was certainly never involved, although the real-life perpetrators and victims lived only two streets away from the Beach Hotel, which sat on the common between the promenade road and the beach.

Strangely enough, a couple of weeks ago I discovered that a film’s been made, based on The Littlehampton Libels, starring Olivia Colman, called Wicked Little Letters, due to be released a few days after Dark Days at the Beach Hotel. I’ll be interested to see what they’ve made of it.

My books are categorised as sagas, or historical romance, and this is the first time I’ve included so much crime in one of them, but it was rather fun to write. I loved the idea of putting the main character into what seemed like an impossible situation and getting the staff together to try to solve it. This might be because I’m a fan of programmes like Father Brown and books like the Whitstable Pearl Mysteries by Julie Wassmer and Agatha Christie’s novels, where ordinary people get to solve the crimes. And I’ve always loved writing the parts of the ‘baddies’ in my books.

I’ve just finished watching series 2 of The Traitors on TV, and it struck me how similar it seemed to this kind of novel. In a way, the baddies are the ‘traitors’, trying to fool people into thinking they’re ‘faithfuls’, while some of the faithfuls are trying to prove they’re not traitors, and the rest of the faithfuls are trying to work out who the traitors are. It’s like the staff at the Beach Hotel sitting around the table in the staff dining room, discussing their theories, and the guilty people accusing others to deflect from themselves. 

Sometimes, as I’m planning a book, I wonder how I’m going to get my characters out of trouble, so it’s often as big a journey for me as for my readers. So, what will become of Helen and her faithful staff? Will the handsome Inspector Toshack go along with the evidence as it appears, or dig deeper to vindicate Helen? What will become of the traitorous antagonists? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to read the book… 

***

Thank you so much for being our guest on the blog today. It has been lovely to have you and the book looks amazing.

It is available as an e-book, audio and paperback, and is currently available on Kindle Unlimited.

(all media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)