Interview with Kate Khavari

Private detectives have come a long way since the days of Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot. Nowadays the detectives and their pasts and their relationships are often just as crucial to the story—sometimes even more important—than the mysteries they solve. Kate Khavari’s A Botanist’s Guide series is a great example. You can find out more about her heroine, Saffron Everleigh, and the world she inhabits by reading the interview below.

What inspired this series?

My inspiration stems from (pun intended) Miss Fisher and Poirot, my two favorite 1920s sleuths, and my love of plants. I’ve always been a lover of historical mysteries, and after a year-long binge of every female-lead historical mystery I could find at the library, I wondered if I could write one myself. I love the classic dinner party murder mystery, and so that’s where I began when brainstorming what would become A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons, the first in the Saffron Everleigh series, and needed a reason for Saffron, the victim, and the suspects to be at the same table, and settled on a close-knit community of a university and all the drama academia inspires. I decided that Saffron should be a botanist because I wanted her to be able to use her knowledge and skills as a scientist to solve the crime, and I wanted to not be bored out of my mind while researching!

Introduce us, please, to Saffron Everleigh. What should we know about her as a personality?

Saffron Everleigh is a botanist working at the University College London in the 1920s. She is trying to figure out who she wants to be and what she wants to do with this passion she has for botany and plants, especially the poisonous ones.

Saffron is a scientist at heart: curious, determined, and wants to learn things for herself—often the hard way. She’s also empathetic and impatient, and that makes her a dynamic character to write! Saffron learns and changes in every book.

It’s not easy to be a female scientist in the early 1920s, even at a university. How would you describe Saffron’s experiences?

Unfortunately, I don’t think her experiences as a woman in science and academia is very far off the experiences of women today. Being ignored, belittled, and even erased from history has always been the struggle of women when they step outside the domestic sphere. Saffron has fought for her place at the university, and even after winning some major battles, like being harassed by a man in a position of power and judged for her working relationship with one of her peers, she is still figuring out if she feels she really belongs at the university.

In 1923, the effects of the Great (aka First World) War were still very present. How does the war affect your characters?

The Great War is a tall, lingering shadow in the mind of most of the characters. Saffron lost her father and her first love in the conflict, and those two losses persist in her inner conflicts. The sudden loss of a father she deeply admired led to her decision to follow in his footsteps as a botanist. The subsequent shock and dissonance she feels upon learning some of his secrets shakes her foundation of confidence in her family relationships and herself. The loss of her first love complicates her feelings for the man she falls in love with over the course of the series. Both of these losses come to a head in A Botanist’s Guide to Rituals and Revenge.

Personal impacts aside, learning more about the effects of the war on society and culture has been fascinating. The way the war changed things for women, of course, has been an area of study for me, as well as how the war jump-started whole new avenues of science and technology. I feel like World War I doesn’t get enough credit for how completely it changed the world!

One character who took a direct part in the war is Alexander Ashton. What would you like readers of this blog to know about him?

Alexander is my favorite character to write about because he continues to be a mystery to me! As Saffron’s original love interest, I wrote him to be as enigmatic and alluring, but as a biologist—who studies bacteria, as Saffron’s best friend frequently bemoans—he needed to be practical, intelligent, and resourceful. Saffron tends to drag him into her investigations, and they balance each others’ strengths and weaknesses well. I find him a fascinating man to write about because, as I delved into his backstory, I found that the war really changed him, and not just because he was injured and carries those scars. His war experience was a crucible, and he still wavers between his past and present self. Readers tend to love him or hate him, depending on what book of the series they’re on.

One of my favorite characters is Saffron’s roommate, Elizabeth (Eliza) Hale. She has a very different personality and interests. Please summarize her description for us.

I’m so happy to hear you enjoy Elizabeth! She is based on my real-life best friend, so that delights me. I love using astrology to determine some of my characters’ personality traits (Saffron is a Sagittarius and Alexander an Aries, in case you were wondering), and Elizabeth is a true Scorpio. She is passionate and creative and will go to the mat for the people she loves the most—and turn right around and give them a talking to whenever they’re being idiotic. She writes lurid poetry, cooks like a professional chef, and tends to drink too much. I decided to give Elizabeth a much bigger part in the series than I’d originally planned because she grew into such a fun, flawed character! Now we see her on the page not only as a voice of reason and comic relief, but as an investigator in her own right, too.

A Botanist’s Guide to Rituals and Revenge is the fourth novel in the series. Could you sketch the setup for it, please?

When her viscount grandfather falls ill, Saffron returns to her childhood home for the first time in years alongside Elizabeth Hale and Alexander Ashton. She faces tense family relationships made worse by the presence of the enigmatic Bill Wyatt, hired on as a doctor. But the man is no doctor; he is a mysterious figure involved in the trafficking of dangerous information, and he believes that Saffron owes him a secret.

The neighbors, the Hales, invite a spiritual medium into their home, and Elizabeth takes great issue with her supposed channeling of her late brother, who happens to be Saffron’s first love. It’s a complication Saffron doesn’t need, given Alexander’s presence has already put their budding relationship under her family’s microscope.

With her relatives under Bill’s power as their “doctor,” Saffron fears she will be forced to surrender her father’s research papers along with her hopes of ever understanding his mysterious legacy—if she can even find the information Bill demands. It’s through the perfumed haze of the séance’s smoke that Saffron must search for the truth before it’s too late.

Are you already working on book 5, and if so, could you give us a hint of what to expect?

I’m right in the middle of edits on Saffron’s next mystery! Book 5 sees Saffron on her very first expedition: traveling abroad to Turkey to participate in the excavation and study of an ancient city. There she will face not only unfortunately familiar misogyny and the unfamiliar culture of a country newly formed and still unstable, but an accusation that will change the course of her life forever. This is my attempt to inject some Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia into the series, and it was so much fun to take Saffron way outside of her comfort zone! It’s been so refreshing to delve deeply into the history and culture of another location, especially a place like Turkey, which had only been a country for a few years at that point and has so many layers of history and culture. It’s been really fun, challenging exercise to imagine how Saffron and the other characters will react to being somewhere so different.

Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Kate Khavari is the author of fiction ranging from historical mysteries to high fantasy epics. She lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas with her husband, two children, and a lovely garden that contains absolutely no poisonous plants. A Botanist’s Guide to Rituals and Revenge is her latest novel. Find out more about her and her books at https://www.kkhavari.com.