I get a lot of questions about how I come up with my book ideas. Often the answer isn’t one lightning bolt of inspiration. Instead, it’s usually a bunch of small things rattling around in my brain that slowly come together to form an idea.
When I wrote The Whispers of War, I knew that I wanted each of the three women at the heart of the book to have a job. (Nearly every heroine I’ve written has a job and her own income, right back to my historical romances.) Marie became a departmental secretary at a university and Nora worked in the Home Office, but Hazel...Hazel was special.
The idea of making Hazel a matchmaker came from the book Marriages Are Made in Bond Street: True Stories from a 1940s Marriage Bureau by Penrose Halson (also published as The Marriage Bureau). The author describes Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, the two owners of the Marriage Bureau, who worked hard to match their clients with eligible singles out of their offices on Bond Street. Their service was discreet as people entrusted them with the intimate details of their love lives, family backgrounds, and more. They used a card system—this will be familiar to anyone who has read The Whispers of War as Hazel uses a similar system to note down her clients’ vital statistics—and they relied heavily on interviews and intuition when matching couples.
You might think that the Marriage Bureau would have closed up shop during the war because demand would have dried up, but it was quite the opposite.
“There are so many young men wanting to marry before they go to the Front, or at any rate to have someone waiting for them when they return and to write to while they are away,” said Heather Jenner.
However, the women did temporarily relocate from their Bond Street building to a big, drafty mansion in the countryside to flee the prospect of bombing, only to be chased back because of chilly, uncomfortable conditions.
When I read Marriage Are Made in Bond Street a couple years before writing The Whispers of War, I fell in love with the idea of two women continuing to try to give people their happily ever after, even during the war. However, that wasn’t the only inspiration I drew on. There was a brief story about a mysterious government official who came into the matchmaking office to warn the owners against German spies trying to infiltrate British society by using their services. From that little anecdote, a huge plot point of The Whispers of War was born.
I’d you like to learn a bit more about the Marriage Bureau and matchmaking during the war, you can watch this newsreel from 1939 to see the owners in action.