Talking History and Research with Madeline Martin -97

We feel it is important to make our podcast transcripts available for accessibility. We use quality artificial intelligence tools to make it possible for us to provide this resource to our audience. We do have human eyes reviewing this, but they will rarely be 100% accurate. We appreciate your patience with the occasional errors you will find in our transcriptions. If you find an error in our transcription, or if you would like to use a quote, or verify what was said, please feel free to reach out to us at connect@37by27.com.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:03

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Christy Leonard, owner and host of Writers in the Wild Retreats, nonfiction voice over artist, and president of WFWA. I'm excited to share with you a little about today's guest. Madeleine Martin is a New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and International best selling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books translated into over 25 languages. She lives in sunny Florida with her husband known as mister Awesome and 2 amazing daughters and 2 very spoiled cats. Welcome, Madeline Martin.

Madeline Martin [: 00:01:02

Thank you so much for having me on Author Express. I'm really excited about this.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:06

Well, I'm really excited because Madeline happens to be a very good friend of mine. So Mhmm. Whenever I get to have friends on the podcast, it just makes it even better.

Madeline Martin [: 00:01:19

Yes. Absolutely.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:20

So I think I've mentioned it before. We have a little group called the Rider Hikers. My very first podcast actually was Sheila, who is also part of our writer hiker group.

Madeline Martin [: 00:01:32

We have a good group for sure.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:33

We really do have a great group. So it's exciting to have a New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly author on here. One of my favorite books actually was one of your first historical fictions, The Last Bookshop in London. And my favorite story is when my sister, who lived in Nebraska at the time, messaged me and said, you have to read this book. It's so good. I think the author lives near you, and she didn't know that I knew you. So it's pretty exciting stuff. Well, we always start with the same question, and that is, tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:16

Doesn't have to be Saint Augustine. It could be where you're actually from, like, originally. It could be somewhere that you've lived that's something interesting. Like, we like to do that to just get a feel for the people we're talking to.

Madeline Martin [: 00:02:28

I'm actually an army brat, so I kind of just lived everywhere, but I lived in Germany for 12 years collectively. So I will say that I lived in Wurzburg, and it was has a really cool castle there and a lot of really neat old stuff. And I actually was there when the Berlin Wall fell.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:48

Are you kidding? How did I not know that about you?

Madeline Martin [: 00:02:52

The funny thing is, so I was young and I don't even actually remember it if I'm being entirely honest, but I was going through my diary and I have a I have, like, a diary entry that I have written and full kid snark. My mom said that the Berlin Wall came down, and I had to put this in my diary because it was something really important to remember.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:11

Oh my gosh. That's hilarious.

Madeline Martin [: 00:03:14

I was like, what a brat was I.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:17

Well, I think it's very appropriate that you write historical fiction since you were in the middle of history. That's pretty cool. So I know you have written a lot of people may or may not know this about you, have written many, many 30 something romance novels. But the historical fiction is really what has helped sort of catapult you to The New York Times. And was that something that you always were interested in doing? You were just kinda biding your time doing romance until you could get to it? Like, how did it come about?

Madeline Martin [: 00:03:50

Historical fiction is really my first love when it comes to books, and it always has been something that I've very much enjoyed. And it's something that I really did want to write, but it was also very intimidating. I think that when you write historical fiction, the historical research is almost more important than the depth of the protagonist, because transporting somebody into that world is so paramount for really having a successful historical fiction novel. And with writing historical romance, that romance is really the primary focus of a story. And I had done research for historical romance, but I had never done the research for historical fiction. And I was very intimidated, hoping that I would have the capacity to do it. And I happened to realize that I not only am a huge lover of history, but I'm also an immense research nerd.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:04:40

Yes. You are.

Madeline Martin [: 00:04:42

Rather than really letting it intimidate me, I ended up really jumping in with both feet and completely immersing myself in the process. And now I I love it so much. And I'm so grateful that I sort of tumbled into this niche and that I took this chance because it has been just such an absolute joy to research these books and write them.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:00

That is so awesome. We're gonna get into the process a little later, but I wanna talk about your most current historical fiction, which for any of you who have read that original The Last Bookshop in London, there might be a little peek into a connection. I'm not gonna say anything to spoil it, but this book also takes place in England. Yes. Were you able to use the same research for both books?

Madeline Martin [: 00:05:27

I was able to use some of the same research because there were still some crossovers as far as just England in general having essential rules that that sort of encompass the entire country. But I definitely had to do specific research for Nottingham because I wanted to make sure that I was accurate for what happened in Nottingham. So I did get a chance to go to Nottingham for about a week and a half for on-site research. And while I was there, I was able to go into bookstores and find tons of incredible research where people had written and self published books about their firsthand accounts that they were selling in local bookshops, things that were talking about the history of Nottingham, where they really kind of broke down the dialect of Nottingham. I mean, there are so many different aspects that I was able to really identify through this literature. And oftentimes that's the case. And that's one of the reasons why for me, it's so important to be able to travel on-site. Oftentimes there's literature that you can only find in that exact location you wouldn't be able to find on Amazon or Thriftbooks or Abebooks or anything like that.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:33

Yeah.

Madeline Martin [: 00:06:34

And it's really invaluable to the research.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:36

Well, we've started talking about the research, but we haven't talked about the book. So give us your one sentence. This is we make it really hard for our guests. One sentence. Tell us about your book.

Madeline Martin [: 00:06:47

Alright. So it's a long sentence. I think that you probably get a lot of long one sentences.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:51

Yes. We do. Run ons. Writers love run ons.

Madeline Martin [: 00:06:55

Exactly. We do. This is a heartwarming home front read about a widowed mother who has to send her daughter away during the evacuation of children in England during World War 2, and it's set in this lovely little lending library called the book lovers library that is based off of a real location.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:12

Very, very good. It's so much more than that though. Gosh.

Madeline Martin [: 00:07:16

Oh, thank you.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:17

It really is heartworm. Like, the books that you write, they really, like, tug at your heartstrings, and that is a skill, I gotta say. You probably worked on that muscle a little bit with your romance, I would guess. Yes. Absolutely. So this book takes place in Nottingham, which is outside of London, and you said you had to do research. Were there similarities or things that made it feel really different? I know the first book was about a bookshop, and this one was about a lending library. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a lending library.

Madeline Martin [: 00:07:55

Yeah. So the lending library was a really interesting concept and really was because I knew that writing about a mother having to send her daughter away during the evacuation was gonna be very difficult and heavy. I mean, after all these women or, I mean, parents in general, put their kids on a train. They didn't know where they were going to go. They didn't know who they were going to live with, and they didn't know how long they were going to be gone for. And if the children left at the very first evacuation and they did not come home until they were given the right or, you know, the okay to come home Right. They would have been gone for 6 years Holy cow. Which is a very long yeah.

Madeline Martin [: 00:08:27

It's a long time.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:28

I can't even imagine that.

Madeline Martin [: 00:08:30

So I knew this was gonna be a heavy topic book, and I wanted to ensure that there was something lighthearted to set some of that heaviness to keep it from feeling so overwhelming.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:39

Yeah.

Madeline Martin [: 00:08:39

And when I read about this lending library, so a little bit about the lending library itself, essentially, the libraries back then in, like, the thirties and forties had a lot of academic books, and they didn't have a lot of novels. And this was really wonderful age and literature. We had all these romances and all of these mysteries really sort of breaking way onto the scene, and people wanted those. And so for the cost of what was essentially a paperback novel back then, you could purchase a membership for a lending library for the entire year.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:11

That's cool.

Madeline Martin [: 00:09:11

And you had your class a subscribers and your class b subscribers, and class a paid a little bit more, so they required a lot more.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:18

Right.

Madeline Martin [: 00:09:19

And it was really neat because it was located in Boots Chemists. So if people are from England and they've seen Boots, if you haven't, it's almost like a CVS or a Walgreens, and they're just about as prevalent. So if you would imagine walking into a pharmacy and you go to the very back of the store or you go to the 2nd floor, and suddenly you are transported to a book lover's paradise. You are no longer in a pharmacy.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:41

Wow. That sounds so cool.

Madeline Martin [: 00:09:44

It's like, you know, it's like the pile carpets, freshly cut flowers, stained glass windows, and just shelves of books. And apparently, this was well, this was written during the time of the marriage bar. And when women got married, they had to give up their jobs to be full time mothers and wives. And, apparently, the librarians of the book lovers library loved their jobs so much that they had statistically longer engagements than women in other areas of employment because they didn't wanna give up their jobs.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:11

I mean, we're all book lovers. We would absolutely do the same thing. Right?

Madeline Martin [: 00:10:15

Exactly. And it was one of those things too, where once I started to delve into it a little bit more, I found just some really great research on the actual customers who used to come into those shops. And there were some that were just so quirky and so fun. And I thought, oh, these are going to be wonderful to use as inspiration for characters in my book. Totally. And so I thought this was the perfect offset for that heaviness and offered a bit of levity and lightheartedness.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:43

That is so awesome. It was actually kind of a quick read. I read it pretty quickly and

Madeline Martin [: 00:10:49

Thank you.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:49

Really just fell in love with the characters and enjoyed going along for the ride. I feel like a lot of books you've definitely heard of the kids being sent off, but I feel like most books are from the perspective of the kids. You don't see a lot that have the perspective of the parents who had to send away the kids, which I thought was really very clever.

Madeline Martin [: 00:11:11

Yeah. Well, that's something for me that really interested me because it's sort of like a like, if you have, like, a bruise and you keep touch like, touching it, it doesn't hurt still doesn't hurt still. For me, it was kind of one of those, like, when I started thinking about women having or just, you know, parents having to send their kids away, I couldn't even, like, I just got, like, obsessed with the idea.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:11:31

Absolutely.

Madeline Martin [: 00:11:32

Yeah. And this was I said, I knew I wanted to write a book about it someday, especially when I heard from a woman who sent me this, like, typed up letter and her her son scanned it and sent it to me. And she thought that I had actually lived during the blitz. And then she said, oh, but you're too young. Oh. Which I thought was, like, the ultimate form of flattery.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:11:49

Wow. Congratulations. That is so cool.

Madeline Martin [: 00:11:54

Thank you. So she told me about her experience. This was after the last bookshop in London. Okay. She told me about her experience as a child evacuee, and she shared her amazing story, which I can't go into too much detail because I will ruin a spoiler. Yeah. But I do detail it in my author's note. And, also, I love to meet with book clubs.

Madeline Martin [: 00:12:14

I do Zoom chats with book clubs all the time. So if anybody has me for their book club, I can tell you the whole story because then I can talk about spoilers.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:23

There you go. Yes. Well, I actually did have you for my book club. It was really fun.

Madeline Martin [: 00:12:29

Yes. It was so much fun. I had such a great time with you guys.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:33

Yeah. The thing that everybody kept talking about afterwards was how passionate you were about the research. And I just think it's funny you were worried about that being something that you could do, and here you are, like, killing it.

Madeline Martin [: 00:12:48

Oh, totally nerding out on it constantly. Yes.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:52

I think for readers, that's really fascinating. Like, the behind the scenes, like, how does the cake get made, I think, is pretty interesting, which I guess is why we have this program. Yes. Which part of the book was the hardest to write? I'm gonna guess maybe parenthood hood and making hard decisions.

Madeline Martin [: 00:13:10

I think the hardest part is that, so I actually sort of base I this was a really personal book. I based a lot of Emma's character off of my own personal experience as a single mother because she's a widow. I was sort of worst, but she was a widow.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:23

Yeah.

Madeline Martin [: 00:13:23

And I also based Olivia, which is her daughter, off of my own daughters. I pretty much went through and I looked up pictures of them when they were 7, 8, and 9 and kind of made Olivia sort of an amalgamation of my 2 girls. And so there were some scenes that I wrote that were heartbreaking. Oh, I can't imagine. Heartbreaking

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:42

Yes.

Madeline Martin [: 00:13:43

Because in my head, she was like my daughter. Right. You know? Yes. And so it was it was oh my gosh. I cried so hard writing this book on some of the scenes. Have your tissues ready.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:53

Yes. Definitely have your tissues ready.

Madeline Martin [: 00:13:55

Like happy tears and sad tears. Not just all sad tears.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:58

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So did you have this book in mind when you wrote The Last Bookshop in London?

Madeline Martin [: 00:14:03

Absolutely not. This was a complete surprise. So you never know what might end up popping up.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:07

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So we always like to make sure that people know how to find you. So what is the best place for people to find you online?

Madeline Martin [: 00:14:18

So probably, my website, which is madelinemartin.com, it has all of my social media available there. It has a contact me form, and it also does have for book clubs, it does have a book club tab. There are all kinds of readers guides and also a contact me if you wanna set up a time for me to zoom in and chat with your book club. And it's always free.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:37

Yes. Absolutely. So we start the same and we always end the same. So what book or story inspires you the most?

Madeline Martin [: 00:14:47

I will say when I was little, I fell in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder at Little House in the Big Woods, and that continues to be probably one of my biggest inspirations that that story just came to life. And I always wanted so bad to be married, but I'm so unequivocally Laura.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:04

I think that's part of what makes reading great is finding a little pieces of yourself in the characters and maybe learning about the other people. And you can always live through another character that may maybe not like you or Yeah. Definitely. Absolutely. Well, this has been an absolute joy. It's crazy that it went by so fast, but hopefully, everybody will go out and get the Book Lovers Library. It is such a great book, and thanks for coming on.

Madeline Martin [: 00:15:34

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:39

Thanks for joining us. We hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at author express podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.