Bloody Good Interview: M.J. Rose on "The Book of Lost Fragrances"

By Nancy Bilyeau

M.J. Rose’s The Book of Lost Fragrances is the sort of read I adore: well-crafted suspense, vivid description, romantic tension, and, best of all, fascinating historical passages. I was lucky enough to score an advance copy a few months ago and I’m still luxuriating in its richness. The virtual blog tour for my own novel, The Crown, is still going strong, thanks to the divine Amy Bruno’s Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours. When I saw that M.J. Rose just launched her own tour, I had to raise my hand. For the first time, I’m interviewing a fellow thriller author—and it’s great fun to use my journalistic background to take a seat on the other side of the (virtual) desk.

First, let me share a description of M.J.’s book, The Book of Lost Fragrances:

"A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra—and lost for 2,000 years.

Jac L’Etoile has always been haunted by the past, her memories infused with the exotic scents that she grew up surrounded by as the heir to a storied French perfume company. In order to flee the pain of those remembrances—and of her mother’s suicide—she moves to America, leaving the company in the hands of her brother Robbie. But when Robbie hints at an earth-shattering discovery in the family archives and then suddenly goes missing—leaving a dead body in his wake—Jac is plunged into a world she thought she’d left behind.

Back in Paris to investigate her brother’s disappearance, Jac discovers a secret the House of L’Etoile has been hiding since 1799: a scent that unlocks the mysteries of reincarnation. The Book of Lost Fragrances fuses history, passion, and suspense, moving from Cleopatra’s Egypt and the terrors of revolutionary France to Tibet’s battle with China and the glamour of modern-day Paris. Jac’s quest for the ancient perfume someone is willing to kill for becomes the key to understanding her own troubled past. The ancient perfume someone is willing to kill for becomes the key to understanding her own troubled past."

M.J. Rose is an internationally best-selling author of 11 novels and two books of nonfiction. The television series PAST LIFE was based on Rose's novels in the Renincarnationist series. She is one of the founding board members of International Thriller Writers and runs the blog Buzz, Balls & Hype.




Nancy Bilyeau: Hello, M.J.! How did you get the original idea for The Book of Lost Fragrances?

M.J. Rose: I was reading about Cleopatra (69 BCE to 30BCE), who was the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, and found she was fascinated with—and some say obsessed by— scent. Marc Anthony built her a fragrance factory, where he planted now- extinct flora and fauna, including groves of balsam trees (important in the creation of perfume at the time) that were confiscated from Herod.

In the 1980s a team of Italian and Israeli archaeologists believe they unearthed the factory at the south end of the Dead Sea, 30 km from Ein Gedi. Residues of ancient perfumes along with seats where customers received beauty treatments were found there.

Cleopatra was said to have kept a recipe book for her perfumes, entitled Cleopatra gynaeciarum libri. The book has been described in writings by historians Dioscorides, Homer and Pliny the Elder. No known copy of the book exists today.

When I read about that book, I knew I had the idea for a new novel.

N.B.: You have at least one character in this book that has appeared in previous books? But would you describe “Lost Fragrances” as a series?

M.J.R.: It’s a very loose series and it doesn’t have to be read in order. On purpose all of the books are written to be stand-alones. What does tie them together is each one touches on reincarnation. I am fascinated on how the past influences the present.

And yes, Malachai Samuels does show up as a character in all the books but he’s never the main character. He’s a reincarnationist in search of legendary lost “memory tools” which can help us access our past life memories.

N.B.: In this novel, I particularly liked the way you used point of view—you leap around very nimbly in the present and then you open up the past to describe very key events. What are the secrets to writing multiple points of view –and on different time tracks?

M.J.R.: I don’t know the secret. I didn’t even know there was one☺ But thanks so much for the compliment. I write and then rewrite forever.

N.B.: How do you research the past times in the book?

M.J.R.: I read a lot and make collages of images I find. Researching all these time periods is one of the most enjoyable parts of writing these books.

N.B.: Did you have a favorite past place to lose yourself in: Paris or Egypt?

M.J.R.: Paris for sure. The most magical city. I can’t spend enough time there.

N.B.: Do you use different “rules” for dialogue and action and descriptive writing in the past than in the modern-day sections?

M.J.R.: Not really rules, no. When I write, the scene plays out in my mind like a movie and the characters seems to help me stay in the right time.

N.B.: I really fell in love with the chapter early in “Fragrances” set in the family crypt. The way you described it made me feel as if I were there. Did you use a specific place to inspire you or was it all from imagination?

M.J.R.: Thank you. So much. I had once seen a photo of the angel sculpture I used in the tomb – I built the whole structure around that angle bathed in cobalt blue light.

N.B.: How much did you know of the history of fragrance creation before you started researching this book? How much additional research did you do?

M.J.R.: When I was in advertising I had a perfume account (one of the fragrances I did was Opium). I learned a lot about the current industry but only learned about the history when I started thinking about this novel. I did more than two years of research, reading dozens of books, meeting with many people in the business, and experimenting a bit with perfume myself.

N.B.: Do you have your own theories on reincarnation and how did they come into play in the book?

M.J.R.: I don’t have my own theories, no. But I’m endlessly fascinated by it.

N.B.: What about the power of scent and how it intertwines with reincarnation? Did you uncover fascinating little known facts and theories when writing this book?

M.J.R.: I think so, yes. One being that ancient cultures used incense – sometimes slightly hallucinogenic incense — to induce meditative states during which you could discover your past life.

N.B.: Finally, what is your favorite scent—and why?

I love many but I’d have say that my favorite is Âmes Soeurs, the Scent of Soul mates. It was created for my novel – a dream I had but never imagined would come true.

I had wanted to commission a fragrance from the tine I started writing the book and looked into it but to do it well with a really quality perfumer was astronomically expensive. And I gave up on that idea early on.

When I was writing the book – to keep in the world of scent – I burned a lot of candles. When I finished writing, I gave a copy of the book to the perfumer who’d created the candles that had inspired me the most: Frederick Bouchardy. (Joya Studios).

After he read the novel he contacted me and we met for tea in the Peninsula Hotel in NYC. He told me he loved the book and wanted to create his version of the fragrance at the heart of the novel. I was so astonished and honored, I actually started to cry.

Bouchardy even named the fragrance after one in the book: Âmes Sœurs the sense of soul mates. It has hints of Frankincense, Myrrh, Orange Blossom and Jasmine. I think it has a smoky uncommon finish that suggests the past and the future, and lost souls reunited.
* * *
Thank you for a fascinating interview, M.J. Rose! This novel, published by Atria Books, goes on sale March 13, 2012.

Anatomy of a Book Trailer

“Wow, I love the video you did for your book. How did that happen?”

That’s the question I’ve heard from friends in the week since I posted a teaser trailer on youtube for my historical thriller The Crown. It’s gotten about 600 hits on youtube (plus the views on my Amazon page, but there’s no stats counter). It’s been shared on facebook and tweeted on twitter. All of which definitely helped build the buzz for my book.

The answer to how it came together is one word: Friendship.

First off, here is the trailer:




I had no master plan for publishing my book that included a teaser trailer. I assumed that they were super expensive—like mini-movies—even for someone with a screenwriting background, like me. A photographer once proudly showed me a book trailer he’d done, and although the novel seemed wonderful, the author looked deathly pale and quite uncomfortable sitting on a couch, talking about her creative process. There was no way I planned to subject anyone to that.

The week after The Crown made its debut in bookstores, I was emailing my friend Christie LeBlanc, bouncing around ideas. The numbers were good, and I was happy…but there was something else I should be doing?

“How about a trailer for the book?” Christie instant-messaged me on facebook (she lives in Ottawa and I live in New York). I’ve been friends with Christie, a filmmaker and screenwriter, since we met in Max Adams’ online writers group, 5150.

“Sure,” came my response. “But I’ve got no budget for it!”

I will let Christie take it from here—I asked her to explain how she pulled off this amazing feat. Just as I turned to her, she turned to Mark Knox, a friend who is a talented musician and composer.

Christie: “This project came together very fast so we could get it out around the same time as the book release. I was lucky to get Mark Knox on board last minute for the music. I gave him an idea of what I was looking for, and he nailed it. And when I say nailed it, I'm not exaggerating. All I told him was that I needed a 40 second or so clip of music that not only reflects the time period and the main character's religious calling, but also captures the mounting tension of the story. What he delivered was beyond my expectations.

“I knew going in that a trailer could never do justice to the book. My goal was simple: to entice the audience into wanting to delve into Johanna Stafford's journey. But with a world as rich as the Tudor Era, and a story layered with ever-mounting danger woven into an intricate storyline, pulling that off in 60 seconds is quite a challenge.

“I opted for one strong visual that would stay with the viewer. I enlisted the mad design skills of Norman LeBlanc to create the crown in blood, then set the scene with well chosen words and the haunting music. I edited them together with a touch of animation at the end, and even with sub-par equipment and a crazy deadline, I'm thrilled with the results.”

So am I, Christie and Mark. So am I!

How Sprint convinced me not to buy a smart phone.

Warning - this has nothing to do with books or thrillers. It's about advertising. But you could argue that the people in the ads need to read more, preferably The Crown, so I stand by my post.

Okay, while I am far from a technophobe, I'll be the first one to admit that when it comes to communication, I'm more than a bit behind the times. My phone plan doesn't include texting, and while I'm not saying my phone is old, the owner's manual came on clay tablets. (*Rimshot*)

Will I join the 21st century? Sure, eventually I'll text, but two recent ads from Sprint have convinced me that I really don't want a smart phone. If you've watched much TV of late, you've probably seen them.

In the first embedded below, you meet a mildly pretty young woman who uses her smart phone. A lot. She spends the entire commercial downloading, uploading, checking her status, everything. She is so absorbed in her phone, she loses her dog while walking it and doesn't even notice. The only actual contact she has with another human being is when someone interrupts her while she's gazing at her phone. God forbid. The point of the ad is that Sprint lets you use your phone all you want, but I went away thinking that this poor woman needs to put a limit on how much she uses her phone.

The second ad doesn't get creepy until the very end. For the first part of the commercial, the message is that there are a lot of apps out there. "You might say there's no limit to what this amazing device can do," the narrator tells us. (Um, okay. Can it change a tire? A baby? I've seen them in action, and usually they just sit there getting stared at.) You get to the :20 mark, and you've got a shot of a kid (maybe three or four years old) totally engrossed in his iPhone. "So the question to ask is, 'Why would anyone want to limit the iPhone?'." To make matters worse, his mom is in the background, totally engrossed in her computer. Thus you have two people (not strangers, one assumes) in the same room, completely ignoring each other.

Now I'm not saying I've never planted my kids in front of the TV so I could write. And I'm not saying that if I owned a smart phone I'd never hand it over to my kids to keep the little critters quiet. But to put this kind of thing in a commercial is just weird. Aren't commercials supposed to sell us our fantasies? These seem to be road maps to our own isolation and our kids' semi-literacy. As cultural artifacts they are fascinating, but as an inducement to buy a smart phone? Epic fail.

Here are the ads:

What is a Book?

Last night on Marketplace I heard a short piece by Jennifer 8. Lee on the future of the book. (The middle initial is not a typo. I am reminded of the Peanuts cartoon when a boy named Five came to visit.) Lee’s was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s gotten me thinking about the format of publishing, and how different it is today than it was in the early modern period, and how it could be in the future. As she notes in her commentary:

we are seeing an new explosion of companies that are publishing shorter-form things that are designed for lower prices... the change does have something to cheer about: We can alter the way we tell stories. There are new ways to follow our imaginary characters. In the same way television is different than movies, these new short stories could be different from traditional novels. It could be the return of the novella.

This observation put me in mind of the wild world of early modern publishing, which featured everything from thousand-page religious works, to Shakespeare’s folio, to cheap pamphlets detailing monstrous births, horrible murders, or some other remarkable happening. While there still exists a great deal of diversity in the literary marketplace, we short stories as stand-alone pieces have gone out of fashion. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t great short stories being written, but they exist either in collections or on the pages of a much longer magazine or literary journal.

The cause of this (to my mind, and I could be wrong) is two-fold: rising literacy rates and changes in the print industry. While figuring out the readership of cheap pamphlets is tricky at best, the consensus is that they found a very broad audience. More to the point, the working poor with only basic literacy would only have read short pamphlets. They were affordable and simple enough to be understood by all comers. In short, until the “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth century anything that can be called “popular literature” was, in all likelihood, short and inexpensive. Now that the vast majority of the book-buying public has the time and literacy necessary to make their way through 4000 pages of Harry Potter, the short story is no longer in demand the way it was in the early modern period. The changes in the industry (over the last four hundred years!) are a bit too much to go into here, but I think it is safe to say that a publishing house that tried to print, market, and sell individual short stories would not last long.

The question this raises, is how the E-book has changed this. Granted at this point I am a novelist and had long assumed I would remain a novelist. (Why? The same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.) But then I noticed the short story (novella?) “Trechary” by Andrea Cremer, which is only available as an E-book. This made me think more about options besides the novel. Once I’ve established my series (Ojala!), why not dedicate a few weeks and a few pages to some of the supporting characters? There are a few whom I like quite a lot, and I would welcome the opportunity to get to know them better. And since my novels are in the first person, the short story would give readers the chance to see the world through another character’s eyes. What’s not to like?

Granted, I’m new to publishing, and the E-book really could be the end of everything for everyone. But for now, it seems like an intriguing opportunity for novelists to break away from long-form writing, and experiment with characters and plotting in ways that have been off-limits (or at least difficult to access) for quite some time.

History of Cromwellian Christmas

A fascinating podcast from BBC Magazine, on the history Christmas under Cromwell. (As a bonus, it includes a tour of the passages beneath Exeter, and the deadliness of water in Tudor England. (Spoiler alert - it has nothing to do with disease!)

Bloody Good Trials

One of the harder aspects of writing about those outside of elite circles is that because most people could not read - and even fewer could write - they leave only a scant mark on the historical record. The challenge the becomes finding these people in the archives. Where can we "hear" those who have left behind no historical record?



To my mind, the best answer to this is in court. You did not need to be rich to be charged with a crime (indeed it could help!), or to be called as a witness, and the records of England's religious and secular courts are full of fascinating descriptions of ever day life. Social historians have been mining these archives for years and have made amazing discoveries.

This is all well and good if you happen to live in England, and have the time to head to the archives for a few days. But what if you're not?

The answer (or at least one answer) is the Old Bailey Online. It is a collection of criminal trials running from 1674 to 1913. The search function is nothing short of amazing - you can search for crimes ranging from "Breaking Peace" to "Violent Theft" with many others in between. You can pull up all the cases resulting in whipping (public or private), execution, branding, or anything else the Court could dream up.

The amount of detail varies widely, from a summary of the case to detailed testimony, but with a little digging you can find some fantastic material with which to work.

(As an aside, my favorite case is of a midwife who, in order to satisfy her husband's desire for a child and to shake off rumors that she was barren, sneaked a dead newborn into her bedroom and pretended to give birth to it. Her cunning ruse soon was discovered.)

Confessions of a Genre Writer

In 2006, in my first online fiction workshop, I submitted two chapters from the historical thriller I’d begun writing. My fellow students critiqued my work; I critiqued theirs. The instructor, “T,” weighed in as well.

At the very end of the workshop, “T” sent me this email: “I'd love to see you produce some more material that seems a little ‘closer’ to you personally, closer to the bone. I mean, you're writing crime thrillers and historical novels, but how about trying to write a story that was closer in spirit to your own time, your own place, your own experience? I'm just saying, Please don't be afraid to write your fiction out of your own sense of character and personal concerns: these genres feel a little uncomfortable to me, and perhaps you haven't really discovered what your subject matter as a fiction writer is. All Best, T.”

This is not the sort of email a budding novelist wants to get.

I kept working on my historical thriller. This was what I wanted to do. I took more classes, determined to improve my craft. “T” had made genre sound like a dirty word but if I belonged in the genre sandbox, so be it. I enrolled in the mystery-writing workshop run by Gotham Writer’s Workshop and taught by a terrific guy named Gregory Fallis. Greg had been a medic in the military, a counselor in a women’s prison, and a private detective. Yes, the man had lived. To my tremendous relief, he didn’t look down on my Tudor England mystery thriller, set mostly in a Dominican priory outside London. In fact, he liked it. A lot. I worked on my chapters and read Greg’s assignments, novelists ranging from Dorothy Sayers to Walter Mosley.

I was working fulltime as a magazine editor and raising two young children, and when things got particularly crazy for a stretch my novel went into the proverbial drawer. Home sick with a fever in the autumn of 2009, I was seized by a sudden desire to go back to my thriller, only half written. Perhaps it was the 102-degree temperature talking, but I staggered to the computer and enrolled in the very next Gotham Writer’s Workshop course. It was “Advanced Fiction,” taught by a man named Russell Rowland. After I’d put through payment, I looked him up—Russell had a MA in creative writing and had written two highly respected modern novels, In Open Spaces and The Watershed Years.

“Oh, no,” I moaned, my head sinking into clammy hands. “He’s going to hate me.”

He didn’t. Russell was a supportive teacher from the start: astute and no-nonsense but never, ever patronizing. What’s more, in this class I found a group of fellow writers who gave me valuable feedback. This was when my book truly came together. I pushed through the middle and then, exhilarated, raced to the end. I finished the novel on my birthday, June 16^th, 2010, and signed with a literary agent the July 4^th weekend. My debut novel was sold in an auction at the end of the month to Touchstone/Simon&Schuster. The Crown will be officially published on January 10, 2012 in North America, and seven foreign countries through the rest of the year.

And yet yesterday I thought of “T” once more.

The memory was triggered by a Wall Street Journal article written by screenwriter and novelist Derek Haas, who has crafted the scripts for “2 Fast 2 Furious,” “Wanted,” and “3:10 to Yuma.”

The article began this way: “I'm sometimes asked to speak to a class of film or literature students at a university. Inevitably, a 22-year-old hipster with designer-chic black glasses and a permanent pout will raise his hand and ask, ‘What does it feel like to sell out?’ I smile. I tell the students, ‘Sell out? Are you kidding me? I sold in!’ "

Haas’s story resonated with me—of always wanting to write thrillers but facing “an upturned nose and haughty eye,” as he put it. “Write what you know,” he was told over and over. Come up with stories of “deep, dark emotional conflict.”

What my teacher—and the “write what you know” proponents Derek Haas faced—could never accept is that crafting a thriller is not a default mechanism for those of stunted gifts. Some of us want to write those sorts of books and scripts. I have always been enthralled by works of psychological suspense: Henry James’ The Innocents, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.  One of the oddest aspects of “T’s” criticism was that only in modern stories could I infuse my work with “personal concerns.” I think Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Margaret Atwood, Caleb Carr, Ken Follett, and Patrick O’Brian have found ways to create complex and relatable characters—people churning with concerns--in historical settings!

Last week I opened a large padded envelope and pulled out my hardcover novel. My editor sent me the one fresh from the printer. I caressed the beautiful deep-gold and burgundy cover, and ruffled my 400 pages.  It was a moment of unadulterated pride.

You know what, “T”? This writer has found her subject matter.