What if the Queen solved crimes?

Thanks to notes, coins and stamps, Queen Elizabeth II had the most reproduced image in the history of the world  

We think we know her so well, and everybody has an opinion. She was a young queen, an elderly stateswoman, one of the few skirts in a sea of trousers at meetings of world leaders, with more experience than most of them put together.

She was a much-loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of - let’s face it - a fairly dysfunctional family. She had vast estates, vast wealth and very little time to herself. She worked every day of the year except Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and was more widely travelled than almost anyone in her generation. Wherever she went, up to a million people would line the streets to see her. She was in the news a lot.

And yet, the Queen didn’t give interviews. If she chose to, she relayed her feelings through images (the blue and yellow flowers in the colours of Ukraine on a table at Windsor Castle, the single tear she mopped up with a gloved finger when she said goodbye to the Royal Yacht Britannia). Often, she chose not to relay those feelings at all. So we think we know her, but we don’t.

What if this very, very famous woman had a secret life? She was intelligent, observant and curious about people. She had access to any expert in the world, knew the state’s deepest secrets, and was famously discreet, so people from staff to state leaders confided in her. Imagine if she used all these attributes to solve crimes.

I’m SJ Bennett, and that’s the idea I had in 2018, when the Queen and Prince Philip were alive and well, Harry and Meghan were lining up to get married, and all was well - it seemed - in the royal world. I’m a passionate reader of crime fiction, growing up with Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and Rex Stout. Today I’m a fan of Elly Griffiths, Lee Child, Donna Leon, Vaseem Khan, Louise Penny and many more. As soon as I pictured the Queen as a detective, I realised a lot of the work was done for me: lavish settings at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, eccentric visitors and a hard-working household, a wide range of animals with walk-on parts (or race-to-the-finish-line parts), plus endless opportunities for crime and its solution.

And so this series was born. Back in the nineties I interviewed to be the Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary, and her world is as accurate as I can make it. Some readers are disappointed that she doesn’t sneak around London after dark, armed with a deerstalker hat and a magnifying glass. She doesn’t. She fits in the work of the ‘little grey cells’ in between her royal duties, and sends (the fictional) Captain Rozie Oshodi, her new Assistant Private Secretary, to do most of the leg work. She exchanges loving, exasperated banter with Prince Philip, her husband of many decades, and dresses up to meet Michael Gove and the Bishop of Leicester, as (really) scheduled in her calendar. Philip’s thoughts on some of her audiences are just about printable.

Occasionally, someone ‘dies of a heart attack’ at Windsor Castle or ‘accidentally drops a glass and falls on the shards’ by the pool at Buckingham Palace. Or a severed hand is found on the beach near Sandringham. That’s all the public know, but we, the inner circle of ‘Her Majesty the Queen Investigates’, know better. How did she keep her secret skills private? You’ll have to read the series to find out.

So far, 4 books have been published in the UK. The first trilogy, set in 2016-2017, has sold half a million copies around the world. Book 4, A Death in Diamonds, goes back to 1957 and starts a new, historical trilogy.

I’m at work on book 5, The Queen Who Came in from the Cold, set in 1961. Although she’s no longer with us, there are seventy years of the Queen’s reign to explore, and twenty-five years before that, so I hope there will be quite a few more books to go.

For the record, I don’t think Elizabeth II secretly solved crimes in her spare time, but if she did, I think she would have done it like this: with shrewd intelligence, diplomacy, compassion, the wisdom born of experience … and a kick-ass ex-military sidekick, to go where a monarch couldn’t be seen to go .

The books are translated into many languages. Check out the Worldwide page to see the Queen on tour.

This website also contains answers to the questions you might have (Did I meet her? Did she read these novels?), a press pack, some reading recommendations, a gallery of images, a royal scone recipe (click the link and scroll down for it), some interactive maps, book club guides and much more. Please make yourself at home. And perhaps you’d like to sign up to my author newsletter at the bottom of this page, which gives a greater insight into the royal world, along with competitions and a link to an exclusive short story.

Look out for Book 4, titled A Death in Diamonds, out in the UK, February 2024

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About Sophia

SJ Bennett grew up reading mystery stories and travelling the world as an army child. She became a strategy consultant and wrote several award-winning books for teenagers before turning to adult crime novels with the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series. Her books have been published in over twenty languages, from Japanese to Catalan. She has taught writing with City Lit, City University and the Royal Literary Fund, and lives in South London, where she also runs a writing podcast for aspiring authors called Prepublished. You can find her on Twitter at @sophiabennett, on Instagram as sophiabennett_writer, and on Facebook at SJBennettAuthor.

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Click here for your Book Club Kit of The Windsor Knot courtesy of William Morrow

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