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THE HARLOT OF ST. CECELIA’S by Darcy Graves #AuthorGuestPost

October 13, 2026 Leave a Comment

THE HARLOT OF ST. CECELIA’S

by Darcy Graves

September 21 – October 16, 2026 Virtual Book Tour

Synopsis:

The Harlot of St. Cecelia's by Darcy Graves

An Inspector Garrett Mystery

London, 1923. American expat librarian Eden Brior thinks things are bad when she is accidentally locked overnight in the St. Cecelia’s Library vault with the charming and unreliable Simon Cross. Then she emerges to find the body of his estranged wife — a celebrated French actress — draped over a chair upstairs.

Detective Inspector William Garrett is methodical, quietly perceptive, and already fairly certain he has his man. He tells Eden firmly to go home and leave the detecting to the professionals. But how can she?

Racing to clear their names before Garrett closes the case, Eden follows the truth from the bright footlights of the London stage through the sleek drawing rooms of Jazz Age society, and into secrets that someone will kill to keep buried.

Steeped in the style of the golden age of detective fiction, The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s captures a London still glittering on the surface and shadowed underneath — where every drawing room hides a secret and every secret has a price.

Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series.

Praise for The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s:

“This novel consistently delights, from the spicy title to the last page.”
~ Kirkus Reviews

Book Details:

Genre: Historical Mystery
Published by: Independently Published
Publication Date: May 3, 2026
Number of Pages: 306
ISBN: 979-8195315580
Series: Inspector Garrett Mystery Series, Book 1
Book Links: Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads | BookBub

Read an excerpt:

Author Bio:

Darcy Graves grew up in Boston and holds an MA in English history and a BS in copywriting. A marketing content writer for over thirty years, she brings to her work a deep love of the golden age of detective fiction — particularly Agatha Christie and P.D. James — and the whimsy of P.G. Wodehouse.

Darcy lives in the Berkshires with her daughter, two ragdoll cats, and a very naughty terrier named Merial. The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s is her first novel.

Catch Up With Darcy Graves:

DarcyGravesAuthor.com
Amazon Author Profile
Goodreads
BookBub – @darcygravesauthor
Instagram – @darcygravesauthor

Victorians, Bright Young Things, and Murder: Why I Chose London in 1923

When people ask me why I set The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s in London in 1923, my answer really begins long before I ever decided to write a murder mystery.

Britain between the wars was my minor field as an historian, and I’ve always been profoundly fascinated by the period. I’m also an unapologetic Anglophile. The more I’ve learned about that time and place, the more compelling that time becomes for me.

I think we tend to reduce historical periods to fads and punchlines after enough time has passed. The 1920s become bobbed hair, Art Deco, cocktails, jazz, cigarette holders, and fringed dresses, right?

All of which are wonderful. Don’t get me wrong. I use them in my books! But underneath them is something much more profound about that time to me. There was this enormous, aching loss of innocence.

The First World War really shattered something in British society, and the 1920s represent people looking at that pile of glass and saying “Well, we may as well dance on it.”

I remember feeling the wound of WWI particularly strongly on my first trip to England. There are war memorials everywhere there. In cities, villages, little churchyards, all these places where the list of names seems impossibly long compared with the size of the community around it.

History books can tell you the casualty figures. But a monument in a tiny English town tells you something different. Those boys went missing from here. They never came home. They left a hole in their parents’ worlds. The girls they knew died spinsters. Their friends came home broken.

That is one reason Robert Graves became so important to me. His memoir Goodbye to All That is extraordinary because the title itself almost captures what happened to a generation. There had been a polite Edwardian world, with all its assumptions about class and duty and empire and masculinity and what England was, and then an entire generation walked into the machinery of modern warfare. And even though some came home, they were not the same. And the world they returned to was not the same one they had left.

Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Long Weekend, their social history of Britain between the wars, was another formative book for me because it looks not simply at politics and great events, but at how people actually lived through that transformation.

And you also have to remember: everybody was there at once.

We think we have some generational conflict now…

There were still Victorians alive who grew up in an unimaginably different world. There were Edwardians who came of age believing in one social order and watched the Great War blow holes through it.

And then here came the young people who would become the Bright Young Things, determined to dance, drink, drive too fast, behave badly, and generally reject everything their parents considered sacred. Because why bother, right? It will all end up in a trench in the end.

Meanwhile, technology is accelerating around all of them.

There are some very specific times when tech has taken these punctuated leaps forward. We’re living in one today. I’m a medievalist, and my other period — the 12th century — was one. In the 1920s you had motorcars, telephones, wireless broadcasting (radio), aviation, cinema, new forms of mass communication, and the physical experience of daily life was changing astonishingly quickly.

Women’s lives were changing too. The war had pulled women into roles they had not previously been allowed to occupy, so afterward it was rather difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Political rights were also expanding. Sufferage. Queer lives and relationships that were increasingly visible. (Though the law was still hostile.) Hemlines were rising. Social and sexual conventions were being tested.

For a novelist like me, that is irresistible. Honestly, I can’t WAIT to keep writing books in this decade. I have a whole list of things to explore.

And I guess that’s why the detail is always so important to me. I want people to feel dropped in the moment. I’m always interested in the difference between knowing what happened in the past and understanding how it felt before anybody knew what was going to happen next.

When I taught history, that was something I tried to impress on my students.

I used to use an example involving trombones and Mozart. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, he famously used trombones when the Commendatore is dragged down to Hell. We don’t think anything of it now, because we hear them a lot. But when it debuted, trombones were primarily used in sacred music and not opera. It was stunning. Shocking. People are said to have fainted in the audience.

Anyone old enough to have seen The Matrix when it came out will know a little of what I mean. The slow motion effects. They are used everywhere today. But the first time you saw them — it was absolutely heart-stopping.

And that is what I want from historical fiction. To experience those trombones as if I were there.

I don’t only want to know that a woman’s skirt was a certain length in 1923. I want to understand who thought that length was ordinary, who thought it was exciting, who thought it meant civilization was coming to an end. To me, that makes things much more interesting.

It also shaped the characters in The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s.

Simon Cross, in particular, grew directly out of my interest in the Great War generation. He is wealthy, witty, charming, socially polished, and profoundly damaged by the war in the most British way (which is to say that he would really prefer nobody talk about it). There is some Wodehouse in Simon, a lot of Evelyn Waugh, a little Chariots of Fire, and quite a lot of Robert Graves.

Eden Brior has a very different relationship to this changing world. She is an American expatriate and a librarian, a woman building an independent professional life in England at a moment when the possibilities available to women are shifting rapidly. She will go on to be a reporter, so she’s got a little Nelly Bly, a (very) little Dorothy Parker.

Inspector Garrett is in an entirely different position. He is also scarred by the war, but in a different way. He is not exactly a relic of the old world, but he believes deeply in institutions, procedure, and order, which makes him interesting to me in a period when so many of those established forms of order are under pressure.

And then I put all of them into St. Cecelia’s. It’s a building based partly on the Woburn Public Library in Massachusetts, filtered through Oxbridge and transplanted, in my imagination, to Greenwich. I wanted it to feel like a character, layered with generations of accumulated history.

So yeah, that is the London I wanted for The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s: not a sepia-toned backdrop and a bunch of clichés, but a living society caught halfway between what it had been and whatever it was becoming, with all the people navigating that transition.

Then somebody gets murdered.

Honestly, what better time could there be for a mystery?

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