Revenge by Mitchell & Mitchell

Elizabeth E Mitchell

There I was, 58 years old, having recently taken early retirement after 44 years of full-time office work, bored – no matter how difficult the knitting pattern it just didn't cut the mustard – I needed a challenge. My sister, Ros, reminded me how much I had loved making up stories for my four younger siblings when we were kids. So true. I remember how upset I was when I found I was too late to save my composition book on the last day of term from being put in the bin. Mr Angel, my English teacher, had been too quick off the mark in clearing out each year's classroom cupboard. The local authority came to my rescue, God love them, with its creative writing classes. I joined and I never looked back, nor was there a dull moment thereafter. Thoroughly hooked, I wrote short stories, novels, poetry and plays, one of which 'A Chance Meeting' was published, all under the name Beth E Browning. Children's stories were fun, murder/detective stories absorbing, and my three-part historical saga aimed at both children and adults took me back to those long-ago times I found so fascinating.

I met Linda, my friend and now co-author, at the writing class, and joining forces the writing duo 'Mitchell & Mitchell' was born. Linda, with her beautiful prose and character enhancing skills, and myself as the main plotter, work well together, researching as we go, trying to make our period stories as authentic as possible, and living our characters' lives as we put them on the page.

Linda Mitchell

Much though I would like to say that Elizabeth and I met tracking down big-game hunters in the Serengeti, it was actually happening to sit next to each other on the first day of a writing class. I had attended other classes over the years but this was by far the most inspirational and, incidentally, lead to many lasting friendships.

I have been scribbling away in some note-book or other as long as I can remember, writing everything from children's stories to mini-plays, and was fortunate enough to win a prize for a ghost story. The one uniting feature of all my work was its brevity; short pieces being my speciality it was with some trepidation that I started out on the adventure of joining Elizabeth in writing a novel, but I found I could hang my prose on her plot lines, and somehow, despite both of us pushing the plot a little this way and that over the many months of writing, with email attachments flying back and forth, we managed to progress without ever a cross word.

The setting of the novel allowed me the opportunity to revisit some of my favourite towns and villages of my native Kent, this time with pen and camera in hand, and happy hours researching what often proved to be quite obscure historical facts.

For Elizabeth and myself our married surnames being the same, seemed to give our collaboration a sense of inevitability – and happily we have never had to concern ourselves with whose name comes first! (It's Elizabeth's, since you ask.)