Guest Post by Julie Anderson
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘opera’? World-famous singers reaching stupendous high notes? Covent Garden or the La Scala? Impossibly expensive ticket prices? Mozart or Verdi? Or perhaps Opera.com the web browser. I hadn’t heard of the last one (being older than 40) until I began my most recent work.
Opera is an Italian word, meaning ‘work’. It is a noun to describe labour performed, as well as the result of that labour. In Latin it’s the plural of the word opus, which also means ‘work’ and a word with which English speakers are probably more familiar. It is now a word widely used to describe a theatrical performance which is mostly sung, as opposed to a play with songs (commonly called musical theatre).
This is the version used most commonly in English and it has lots of spin-off words and usages, e.g. opera house, opera glasses, operetta, opera lyrica, operatic. It is also the title of the third novel in my crime fiction series featuring Whitehall sleuth Cassandra Fortune.
Opera is published on 5th September. The series began with Plague (Claret Press, 2020) set in and beneath the streets of London and continued with Oracle (2021) set in Delphi, where long-ago but not-forgotten crimes come back to haunt their perpetrator. Opera brings Cassandra back to London, the scene of her earlier triumph, but it is also the scene of her confrontation with her nemesis, the villain she encountered in the first book.
Cassie has always been devoted to her work and, in the latest book, she is trying to find out why, some time before Plague begins, she lost her beloved job at GCHQ and had to leave it under a cloud. Now she looks back at those events from a more secure position, after time has passed, she realizes that the truth as presented to her back then – that it was all her own fault – doesn’t quite ring true. So, she goes to visit an old friend and mentor to ask what she should do. Little does she know that this search will draw her back into a shadowy world of espionage and falsity and that her discoveries will place her in great danger.
As you would expect, there is an opera in Opera. This is Tosca by Giacomo Puccini and it contains many of the same themes as can be found in my book. As Cassie says
‘It’s set in eighteenth-century Rome,’ Cassie began to explain. ‘Though it’s really quite modern, with the democrats of the Second Republic uniting to do battle with secret police and aristocrats.’
‘Ah, but it’s a love story too,’ the minister said, as he put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘Our heroine Tosca is pursued by the lecherous Baron Scarpia who demands that she succumb to him in order to save her lover from execution. Tosca is about sex and death, but also art and love… and horrible abuse of power. Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore she sings in despair as she is about to be raped by a policeman. I’ve lived for art, I’ve lived for love. Very dramatic and tragic.’
Cassie and her party are at the Royal Opera House watching Tosca when she has a flash of insight, inspired by the opera, and she works out what may have happened many years ago, in a distant land. This enables her to solve a much more modern mystery. But that’s not all – later, Cassie must face her own Baron Scarpia.
The tag-line of Opera is ‘Truth Never Dies’ and it is Cassie’s search for the truth of what happened to her and her work which leads her into the murky world of spies and real-politic. What is real and what only appears to be? Who can be trusted and who is double-dealing?
Can she uncover the truth and survive? It’s all in a day’s work for Cassie.
Opera is published by Claret Press on 5th September 2022. It can be purchased online around the world and in all good bookshops in the UK and Europe.
You can pre-order her book today on Amazon! Be sure to also follow Julie on her website for more information about her past and future books: https://julieandersonwriter.com/
Congratulations to Julie!