I have been an avid reader (and lover) of Fiona Veitch Smith’s Poppy Denby Investigates novels, so am thrilled to be a part of her blog tour as she celebrates the release of her fifth book, The Art Fiasco. Here she tells us more about the faith journey of her main character, Poppy, as well as her own.
When Poppy Denby (22) arrives in London in 1920 to start work on a newspaper, it is the first time she has moved away from her evangelical community. And she’s in for a bit of a shock. She goes to live with her suffragette aunt, a former doyenne of the West End stage, and gets introduced to an eclectic mix of socialites and socialists.
Aunt Dot believes in God and drops into the occasional church service, but is not an evangelical Christian. She, like her brother Poppy’s father, was brought up Anglican. Poppy’s father became a Methodist when he met his wife, an earnest evangelical, running a soup kitchen. He becomes a Methodist minister. However, it’s her mother’s strict fundamentalism that has the most influence on Poppy. She spends most of The Jazz Files worrying about what her mother will think of her new lifestyle choices: drinking alcohol, wearing make-up and going to jazz clubs with the totally irreligious Delilah Marconi.
For most of the first two books Poppy is being weaned away from strict evangelical culture. Some people would describe it differently: ‘backsliding’. However, that’s not what I intended to convey. What I hope to show in Poppy’s spiritual journey is that she comes to meet other people of faith who do not have the same views as her mother, and that she learns to separate belief from approved behaviour. She meets people whose faith is expressed through social justice and human kindness, some of whom, like the mentally abused Elizabeth Dorchester, doggedly hang on to God by their fingertips, rather than through puritan standards of morality.
However, Poppy’s faith remains an important part of her life. But all is not peaceful in her heart as she lost her brother in the war. ‘Why did God let him die?’ and ‘why does God allow suffering when he has the power to stop it?’ are questions that claw at her soul. The crisis comes to a head in The Death Beat, where, by the end, she finds some sense of contentment, even though all threads have not been neatly tied up. This is what many of my readers (Christian and non-Christian) say is something they can identify with: Poppy does not have all the answers, and shares many of their doubts.
In The Cairo Brief, she again has a meltdown when she attends a séance. The dire spiritual fears of her youth resurface as she is terrified of opening herself up to the occult and demonic influences. However, she soon discovers the whole thing is a hoax, exploiting the emotions of the bereaved for financial gain. Nonetheless, she is still desperately worried that a photograph of her at the séance might find its way to her mother.
Book five, The Art Fiasco, is set two years later. In between the usual murder and mystery, Poppy finally goes home to face her mother. But Poppy has grown as a woman – and as a Christian – since the guilt-ridden days of The Jazz Files. She now firmly rejects her mother’s view that a Christian woman should not work for pay. She believes that what she does as a journalist and amateur detective is just as much ‘God’s work’ as teaching Sunday School and working in soup kitchens. She believes that bringing killers to justice and helping bereaved families discover the truth is worthy work. She no longer cares (as much) what her mother thinks about her lifestyle (which by most standards is still fairly modest). However, she also grows in respect for her mother who, despite her strict views, is portrayed as a woman of compassion, helping young women who have become pregnant out of wedlock. She is respected by the mining community with which she works, despite, in their words, being a ‘bit of a Bible basher’. In turn, Poppy’s mother learns to respect her daughter and her choices – although she’ll never get over her wearing make-up.
What of Poppy’s journey is reflected in my own?
I went to a C of E primary school in the 1970s and occasionally attended church with my mother, who believed in God but was not overtly religious. I went to my first (and last) Sunday school class on my fourth birthday. When the teacher announced it was one of the other children’s birthday, I stuck my hand up to say it was mine too. In front of the whole class she said, ‘You shouldn’t lie, Fiona, God doesn’t like liars.’ I never went back.
When I was ten my dad got a job on the mines in South Africa. Soon after we moved there, we were befriended by a deacon in the local Methodist church who asked if he could take my brother and I to church with him. My parents thought this was a good idea. What they didn’t know was that he was a paedophile. I was his victim for over a year – the first incident taking place in the car park of the church while Sunday school went on inside. We moved to another town when I was eleven; my parents never knew about the abuse.
It was when I was eleven that I came to know God myself. The Gideons handed out Bibles at my school; I took mine home, read it and now believe that God spoke to me personally that day. Despite my bad experiences with church people, I came to have a faith of my own. To cut a long story short, for the next 20 years I was involved in a series of fundamentalist and evangelical churches, communities and para-church organisations, some of whom (along with a number of good things) had very strict behavioural codes and cut-and-dried theology about who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. It was only in my early 30s that I started to realise that I didn’t have to believe all that to be a follower of Jesus.
Now, aged 50, I no longer consider myself an evangelical, although I am content being a member of a progressive evangelical Baptist church. The writing of the Poppy Denby books over the last six years has reflected some of that journey. Poppy’s mother is representative of the type of Christianity that I have been weaning myself from. And now, like Poppy, I’m far more content in my faith: God has never let me go; and is more important to me than ever.
Fiona Veitch Smith is the author of the Poppy Denby Investigates novels, Golden Age-style murder mysteries set in the 1920s (Lion Fiction). The first book, The Jazz Files, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, while subsequent books have been shortlisted for the Foreword Review Mystery Novel of the Year and the People’s Book Prize. The latest book, The Art Fiasco, is out now. See www.poppydenby.com for more information on the series.
If you are interested in reading more from Fiona on my site, you can take a look at previous guest blog posts from her here and here and read an interview I did with her after The Jazz Files was published.