Christine Wells worked as a corporate lawyer in a city firm before exchanging contracts and prospectuses for a different kind of fiction. In her novels, she draws on a lifelong love of British history and an abiding fascination for the way laws shape and reflect society.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Today, I’m chatting to Christine Wells. Thanks for joining me, Christine.

Christine Wells:            Thanks so much for having me, Sarah. It’s great to be here.

Sarah Williams:            I appreciate you spending the time here today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to publication?

Christine Wells:            Well, I’m a Brisbane girl, and I started off wanting to be a brain surgeon when I was very young and very soon realized that I didn’t like the sight of blood very much, so I switched and ended up becoming a lawyer, which showed a lot of imagination. But I ended up, when I was a solicitor working for a law firm, I really started to love writing, and I got into it in a big way. I just couldn’t stop. Well, I did stop to do actual work, but I was writing in my lunch hours and way into the night and on weekends. Eventually, I decided to give up the law and become a writer full-time.

Christine Wells:            So, I mainly self-taught. I had a bit of a self-taught apprenticeship for about four years before I actually sold a book, and that was through the RWA, Romance Writers of America. They had several contests where acquiring editors would judge the contests if you got into the final. So I had a few manuscripts with editors over in New York, and one said she wanted to buy it. You never, ever, ever say yes. You say, wait while I get an agent. So I was on the phone overnight to America trying to talk to all the agents that I had been submitting to and ended up with one the next couple of days. And then, it was a Friday. She sent the manuscript around for everybody to read over the weekend, and I think by Tuesday, I had a deal with a different publisher from the one who had originally offered. So, yeah. It was sort of a long lead-in and then a whirlwind sale in the end.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. So you wrote ten novels before you’ve written these ones, which we’ll come to in a minute. So you wrote those ten novels, and they were published to New York publishers, so tell us about those. What sort of books were they?

Christine Wells:            They were historical romance set in Regency England, and one lot were under the name Christina Brooke. That was for St. Martin’s press.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. And now, you’ve written three books about historical romance and historical fiction, and you’ve written them under your name, Christine Wells. So, it’s The Wife’s Tale, The Traitor’s Girl, and your latest one is The Juliet Code. So tell us about these ones ’cause they’re all three quite different, but very, very interesting storylines. So tell us about them.

Christine Wells:            Well, the latest one is The Juliet Code, which I happen to have right here. It’s set in World War II England and Paris, France. It’s about a wireless operator who is captured behind enemy lines and survives the war, but then afterwards, an SAS officer wants her to help him find his sister, who was also captured and was lost after the war. He wants to find her, dead or alive. And Juliet has her own secret that she doesn’t want to come out.