Local author trades romance for espionage in wartime work

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This article was published 04/05/2021 (1848 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kelly Bowen has made a name for herself as a prolific and popular writer of historical romance novels set in England’s Regency era of the early 19th century. For her latest novel, however, the Winnipeg author turned the sizzle down to a simmer, creating a work of wartime historical fiction that weaves together espionage, art history and forgotten heroes — and, yes, just a flicker of romance.

The Paris Apartment, published in mid-April by Forever, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, is being launched online on Wednesday at 7 p.m., when Bowen will be joined virtually by author Erika Robuck (The Invisible Woman). (To register, see wfp.to/bowenlaunch.)

Bowen got degrees in veterinary studies and worked as a research scientist before diving into the world of historical romance. She submitted her writing to a contest held by the Romance Writers of America, eventually catching the eye of publishers. Many award-winning novels later, Bowen is now established as a well-known name in the genre; her series include The Lords of Worth and Season for Scandal.

The idea for The Paris Apartment — which is firmly rooted in the historical fiction genre rather than historical romance — was one that was rattling around in Bowen’s brain for some time. The novel features dual narratives, one set during the Second World War and the other in 2017. “This was a first for me, both writing in two narratives and writing in a contemporary time period,” Bowen says. “They had phones, that was exciting, and trains — they could go places faster,” she adds, laughing.

In the more recent timeline, a woman named Lia Leclaire inherits her late grandmother’s Parisian apartment — a residence previously unknown to her family. Lia discovers the apartment, untouched for decades, is filled with artwork, clothing and more. She eventually connects with English art dealer Gabriel Seymour, who begins to help her understand where the art came from, and the pair develop an increasingly intimate relationship.

In the wartime storyline, Lia’s grandmother Estelle struggles to navigate Nazi-occupied Paris, where danger seemingly lurks at every corner — especially for someone with connections to the resistance movement. She eventually connects with Sophie, a British secret agent with a tragic past sent to Paris to find a German Lorenz cipher machine located somewhere at the Ritz. The hope is that Allied forces can learn how the machine works, break the coded messages and bring an end to the war.

The idea for an untouched apartment filled with treasures arose in part from the real-life story of Mme. De Florian, who died in 1939 but whose apartment in Paris remained relatively unchanged until 2010, when her granddaughter died at age 91.

The paintings discovered in the novel’s apartment, meanwhile, were inspired by the Gurlitt horde, a collection of around 1,500 works of art, many of which were thought to have been pilfered by the Nazis during the war.

Bowen’s research led her to a trove of declassified documents available online that helped with the historical accuracy of The Paris Apartment. “I love history, so the research part of this book, or any of my previous books, is almost the best part,” she says. “The little details and nuances of the plot tend to pop up as you’re researching — you find that little nugget buried in there and you think ‘I could use that.’”

Among the discoveries Bowen found quite moving in her research was the trove of art recovered after the war whose provenance was (or is) unclear. “That art, tied into the loss of families, of lives, of history… It can’t be compared to the loss of human lives, but it’s the loss of what it represents,” she says. “The number of paintings (the Monuments Men Foundation) can’t return because the families have ceased to exist anymore… it’s so sad.”

The characters of Estelle and Sophie, meanwhile, are based on the real-life exploits of women such as Pearl Witherington Cornioley, Josephine Baker, Virginia Hall, Christine Granville and others, women whose covert roles in the war have long been overlooked or given short shrift in conventional wartime histories.

“I’ve always been interested in the roles women played during the Second World War,” Bowen says. “They’re definitely underrepresented… that narrative you’d learn at school, or in a history class, or the movies — they just don’t appear, they don’t exist.”

And while Bowen has a synopsis for a historical romance series waiting in the wings, she’s currently at work on another Second World War-era novel of historical fiction — a genre currently enjoying a wave of popularity.

“People might say there’s an awful lot of books set in the Second World War time period, but there are also a lot of stories that need to be told,” she says. “We’re just giving voice to those stories.”

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca