Globetrotting with Katherine Woodfine’s Taylor & Rose Secret Agents

23rd July 2021

From the dazzling city of lights to the magnificent streets of St. Petersburg and the enchanting canals of Venice, top secret agents, Sophie Taylor and Lil Rose have well and truly travelled the world! And now, in their fourth and final action-packed adventure, Sophie and Lil have set sail to New York City on an elegant ocean liner, ready to face their enemies and settle old scores.

To celebrate the publication of Nightfall in New York, Katherine Woodfine is here to tell us all about her globe-trotting super secret agents and how the iconic Titanic inspired her story writing.

When I started writing my Taylor & Rose Secret Agents books about Edwardian ‘young lady detectives’ Sophie Taylor and Lil Rose, I knew travel would be a key element of the series. In my previous books about Sophie and Lil, we’d seen them solve mysteries in 1900s London. Now they’d be putting their detective skills to work as secret agents, working for the newly-established British Secret Service Bureau.

As in any classic spy story, my secret agents would be travelling to different cities on dangerous undercover missions. I knew it would be fun to write about globe-trotting young women in the early 20th century, as they embarked on everything from stowing away on a train into Imperial Russia (in Spies in St Petersburg), to climbing aboard some of the earliest aeroplanes (in Peril in Paris).

For the final book in the series, Nightfall in New York, I wanted to explore one of the most famous modes of transport of the period, the transatlantic ocean liner. And as this book is set in the spring of 1912, I knew that I had to take inspiration from the best-known liner of them all — the RMS Titanic.

Like many people my age, I saw the 1997 film Titanic in the cinema, and was totally captivated. I was 14 at the time, and although I already vaguely knew the story of the Titanic disaster, the film brought it vividly to life. When I knew Sophie and Lil would be travelling across the Atlantic in Nightfall in New York, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pay tribute. However, I soon realised that writing about the Titanic would be no easy task.

While all my books have required historical research, it was obvious that researching the Titanic would take this to the next level. There’s an unbelievable amount written about the ship and its fateful voyage: I found hundreds of novels, numerous non-fiction books, and dozens of films, podcasts and TV series. Then there was the wealth of information available online from websites like the Encyclopaedia Titanica, including everything from comprehensive passenger lists to detailed plans of every corner of the ship. Lost in a research rabbit hole, I quickly found there was so much material to work with that at one point I horrified my long-suffering literary agent by suggesting that my ocean liner scenes could form a whole separate book.

In the end though, my own fictional transatlantic liner — the RMS Thalassa — ended up being rather different to its real-life counterpart. Fans of the 1997 film, or those who know the real history will enjoy some fun references, from nods to Kate Winslet’s outfits to a dinner scene featuring some of the dishes that really were served up in First Class on the Titanic’s last evening. But in the end it was some of the smaller details that caught my imagination which ended up making their way into my story — from a character inspired by Dorothy Gibson (a Titanic survivor and silent film star who played herself in a film entitled Saved from the Titanic just a month after the disaster) to the state-of-the-art ‘Marconi’ wireless telegraphy equipment onboard.

In particular, I drew on some of the conspiracy theories that have sprung up around the Titanic — including the rumour that the ship was deliberately sunk in order to kill the American millionaires Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim who were among the passengers on board. Then there’s the tale of the so-called ‘unlucky mummy’ — an Ancient Egyptian mummy which was believed to have been in the hold, putting the ship under a curse — or the idea that the Titanic could have been deliberately bombed by a covert enemy submarine. I enjoyed weaving some of these wild theories into my adventure story, which itself is partly inspired by the conspiracy-filled spy yarns of the 1900s and 1910s, as well as classic mysteries and children’s adventure stories.

Most of all though, I enjoyed incorporating in all the rich details of transatlantic travel in the early 20th century — from steamer trunks and staterooms to peculiar seasickness remedies. I hope that reading Nightfall in New York will give young readers some insight into what it might have felt like to be a passenger embarking on a bold journey across the Atlantic on a grand ocean liner, headed for a whole new continent. And importantly, in a summer in which most of us will be unable to travel very far, I hope they will relish the feeling that they too are setting out on an intrepid transatlantic adventure, alongside Sophie and Lil.

Katherine Woodfine

Illustrations by Karl James Mountford / @karlj_mountford

PS. Make your own Taylor and Rose passport here and earn stamps in your passport with each adventure!

Katherine Woodfine is a true champion of children’s literature. She studied English at Bristol University and in 2005 she was highly commended in Vogue magazine’s annual Talent Competition for young writers. Until 2015 she was Arts Project Manager for Booktrust, where she project-managed the Children’s Laureateship and YALC, the UK’s first Young Adult Literature Convention, curated by Malorie Blackman. She is part of the founding team at Down the Rabbit Hole, a monthly show for Resonance FM discussing children’s literature. Katherine blogs at followtheyellow.co.uk. She lives in London.

katherinewoodfine.co.uk
@followtheyellow

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