A Death in Diamonds

Acknowledgements

As always, I must thank the late Queen Elizabeth II for a life of service, a sense of fun, and for preserving the mystery of the monarchy enough to let a novelist imagine this secret fictional string to her bow.

I have been lucky to see this series, like the Queen, travel around the world, and I want to take this chance to thank Sam Edenborough, the team at ILA and all my editors, translators and marketing teams in countries from France and Germany to Australia and Japan. It’s a privilege to see your support for the stories and the wonderful covers you give every book.

At home, I’m ever grateful to Ben Willis at Bonnier Zaffre, who is the best editor I could possibly hope for. Thank you, too, to Nick Stearn for the covers, to Iker Ayesteran for the wonderful illustrations (especially the corgis), to Isabella Boyne for making everything run more smoothly than I have any right to ask, and to Elinor Fewster for making sure people know about the books.

Charlie Campbell at Greyhound Literary remains the best agent in the business. I still feel as lucky as I did when we started out together in 2020. And here we are, four books down the line.

The Transatlantics: thank you for all your encouragement and sage advice. Bonnie MacBird, you are a great Sherlockian and a treasured friend. Vanessa Harbour, I couldn’t have done it without you this time; those Friday morning crit sessions were times well spent.

To all the writers in the crime community, thank you for being such a supportive and creative bunch. Especially Vaseem Khan, for your generous encouragement, and Ruth Ware, for being the ideal person to bounce ideas off if somebody needs to be killed in a way a police pathologist might not be able to reconstruct. Don’t get on Ruth’s bad side, is all I can say.

The Queen’s year of state visits in 1957 was a busy one and I sourced the finer details of her schedule from many places, not least the Pathé newsreels of the day. But a favourite resource for its (rare) reliability on exactly where the Queen went each day and what she wore, was the Royal Watcher blog. Thank you, Saad Salman. I’m also grateful for the writing and research of Michelle Morgan (When Marilyn Met the Queen, 2022), and Margaret Forster’s biography of Daphne du Maurier (1993).

As always, I’m grateful to Emily, Sophie, Freddie and Tom. The boys have put up with my very late-night writing to deadlines for fourteen books now, so I owe you a lot. Thank goodness you can make pasta and pesto. And Alex, this is fundamentally a story about love, so you are at the heart of it.

Last but by no means least, I want to say a huge thank you to all my readers. Nothing gives me a thrill more than hearing from someone who has newly discovered the series. I’m especially grateful to the band of subscribers to my author newsletter, who have become part of my life. I’m honoured that these books have lifted so many of you up when you were down. I love hearing your own stories and memories of the Queen, knowing you enjoyed the short stories, and reading your entries to the competitions. Please keep them coming!

You can contact me via my website, at sjbennettbooks.com. It’s always lovely to hear from you.