Lori Inglis Hall, The Shock of the Light

Brett sits down with author Lori Inglis Hall to discuss her debut novel, 'The Shock of the Light'. They talk about her passion for history, the photographer Lee Miller, the inspiration for this story, spies and double agents during the second World War, strong female protagonists, and characters with secrets.

Lori's website:

https://www.loriinglishall.co.uk/

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https://www.instagram.com/loriinglishall/

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Transcript

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Brett Benner 0:00

Hello everybody. It's Brett Banner and welcome or welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack. For those of you out there who are my historical fiction fans and you know who you are. This book is Tailor Made for You. It is the new book from Lori Inglis Hall, her debut book, I should say, the Shock of the Light. It's fantastic. I loved this thing and I think you will too. A little bit about Lori. She has a research MA in history from Goldsmith's College, university of London, and works as a researcher and rights manager for the estate of the photographer, Lee Miller. Previously, she spent a decade working in politics at the House of Commons. She lives rurally in Sussex with her family and an inordinate number of books. The shock of the light is her debut novel. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Hey everybody, I am thrilled to be sitting down today with author Lori Inglis Hall, for her book, the Shock of the Light, which is just, so wonderful. So thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Lori Inglis Hall 1:14

Hey, thank you for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here.

Brett Benner 1:20

Before we get into the book a little bit, I wanted to go into some of your background because I just, I found so much of that fascinating. So you have an MA in research and history from Goldsmith College from the University of London, correct.

Lori Inglis Hall 1:32

Yeah, which is where I got really deep into the French resistance when I was an undergraduate as well. And then when I goldsmith, yeah, I just read so much about these women secret agents, which just seemed like such an astonishing thing. Just an incredible part of the Second World War. So that's what I focused my thesis on. But it's an area that I've always been really interested in. I grew up with a sort of second world war obsessed dad who every weekend we were at a tank museum but we had, endless family holidays based around this area of history. When I was 10, we went to the 50th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, which was a really incredible experience. Really is still quite vivid in my mind. So more stories about my granddad and his involvement with Belgian resistance because he lived in Belgium. So yeah, it's this area of history that somehow has always been part of my life.

Brett Benner 2:32

Were you always a huge reader when you were young based on what you're saying, it sounds like you always tended towards the historical Yes.

Lori Inglis Hall 2:39

Yeah, absolutely. A massive reader. Pretty much from when I, I could learn to read when I was really young. I was about three when I learned to read. So just yeah, was right there from the start, took to it. And pretty much when I discovered what books were, I knew that I wanted to write one. So I always read loads. I'm from a very big reading. Family books were always part of our life, part of my childhood. And I knew that I wanted to write stories, always wrote stories. I was really lucky and having really great English teachers who would set us a lot of creative writing projects and, everyone would hand in their kind of double side of a four and I'd hand in 10 pages, double sided. And my poor English teacher took it really well. And even though I probably took up more of his weekend with marking than he wanted he never discouraged me which looking like I really appreciate.

Brett Benner 3:35

That's amazing. Okay, so then you spent. A decade working in politics In the house, at the House of Commons? Yes. And how did that come about?

Lori Inglis Hall 3:44

that came about quite by chance, was not something I had ever really considered, although I do consider myself quite a political person. I just had a friend who I was doing my ma I was working part-time in London. Very expensive place to live trying to get by and study. I was working at the National Gallery. A colleague there had got a job at the House of Commons, just taking. School groups around talking to them about politics and our political system over here and said, I think you might be interested in this. So I did that while I was doing my ma and then got offered a job working in a bipartisan role for the House of Commons and ended up doing that for yeah, close to a decade. So

Brett Benner 4:34

Now, while you were doing that, were you writing at that time? Had you still, was that the constant

Lori Inglis Hall 4:41

Yeah. I didn't publish anything. I think I am, I'm like most debut novels in that this is my debut, but it's not my novel. There's a few, tucked away in, in drawers. I never to see the light of day, but I think that's part of it. I never felt like I wasted my time writing something that didn't get published because with everything I wrote I learned from it and definitely was honing my craft, if I can say that without but yeah, so it was always part. Part of my somehow orders my thoughts, which are always very busy in a way that will make sense to no one at all. But but does to me,

Brett Benner 5:30

yeah, so then that's all that matters. One of the things that I particularly love about a historical novel, and this is an just an excellent example of it is first of all the things that I don't know when I go into something and didn't know in terms of all the factual stuff but one of the really interesting things, again, before even the book starts is you working as a researcher and rights manager for the estate of the photographer, Lee Miller. Now I have to tell you like. This is me, whatever, ignorant, sexist. I don't know what the word exactly is, but I assumed Lee Miller was a man. And so when I looked up on the internet two days ago when I was writing notes for this, I was shocked. Okay, this is the woman, but her history and I would love for you to talk a little bit about her because I can't help but think that she was, in some ways lent itself to parts of Tessa or this story as well. Yes. Am I wrong?

Lori Inglis Hall 6:30

Definitely she had a huge visual influence on the novel. I spent seven years surrounded by her images of which there are thousands. Aside from what is published, there are thousands of images that. have never seen the light so yeah, she definitely, she took incredible photographs of, I should say Leila was war correspondent for British Vogue Magazine which people are always astonished that. British folk had their own war correspondent, but they did, and it was her. And she went into France a few weeks after D-Day and was on the ground with US troops because British, the British Army would not take a woman with them. So she was always attached to the US Army. So she was really capturing Europe at a really pivotal stage in the conflict. She was really with the liberators and. Also finding herself on the front line at times and really seeing the devastation of years and years of war in Europe. People who had been displaced. The deprivation that was very persistent in Europe in from 1944 onwards. And she's really and I guess this is where she ties in with the novel in particular, is she was really drawn to normal people and the way the conflict had. Affected them. She was, of course, covered the flash bang the, the shooting and the carnage and the casualties. But she was also really interested in just how people who were living in these places in this conflict, how it had affected their normal lives. Particularly women, particularly as I say, refugees, displaced people. And I've always been really interested in that too. As I say that, the way it affected normal people, which is something I very much look at in, in the novel with the character of Theo. But she was incredible. And she wa you know, she totally used the fact that people thought she was a man as well, with a name Lee. I mean her name was Elizabeth, but she'd always been known as Lee when she was a photographer in the 1930s in New York. She set herself up as this society. Portrait photographer and a lot of people didn't realize they were having their photograph taken by a woman until they knocked on her studio door and she opened it. So yeah, you are definitely not the first.

Brett Benner 8:55

Yeah and also just to know she was a supermodel, like she was one of the early supermodels, and that was the whole thing I was like.

Lori Inglis Hall 9:02

She had just an extraordinary life. Her son wrote a book about her called The Lives of Lee Miller, and that's just the most perfect title for a book about his mom, because she just had all these extraordinary lives. She was, yeah, she was on the cover of Vogue in the late twenties. She was discovered by Conde Nast himself while she was, crossing the road in New York. So the story goes and yeah, she was a, man Ray's assistant in Paris, she had her own surrealist photography studio in Paris. She was a society photographer in New York. Then she became a war correspondent, and then towards the end of her life, she became quite a celebrated gourmet cook. And made very colorful, very surrealist dishes. So yeah, she, she had a really astonishing life, but didn't escape. Didn't escape the impact of the conflict either, had really quite terrible struggle with PTSD after the war because she saw some horrific things. She was one of the first journalists in Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated. The day after it was liberated, she was in there. And that really had an impact on her for the rest of her life.

Brett Benner 10:08

Wow. Yeah, she sounds absolutely amazing. I cannot believe that someone hasn't optioned her story and made it a movie

Lori Inglis Hall 10:14

Yeah, there was a movie a year or two ago with Kate Winslet I dunno how big it was in the states maybe, but yeah, Kate Winslet played Lee Miller. So it was all very exciting for a while.

Brett Benner 10:25

That's crazy. I have to look, I have to look that up. Yeah. I, 'cause I had no idea. Okay, so do you have, an elevator pitch for the book.

Lori Inglis Hall 10:34

Okay. So it is a novel about twins, PAA and Theo, who are as close can be. Until Tessa returns from studying in Paris and something has changed before Theo can work out, what's happened? The twins are separated again this time by war. So Tessa is recruited into a secretive British organization called the Special Operations Executive and parachuted into occupied France, whereas Theo goes off into the RAF, becomes a spit fire pilot when he comes home. He finds out that Tessa is missing and then he really dedicates his life to finding out what on earth has happened to his sister.

Brett Benner 11:15

Okay, so obviously your your own historical interest drove some of this, but is there one particular thing that says, this is the book that I'm going to write?

Lori Inglis Hall 11:24

just being so fascinated by, the SOE story, special operations executive story is just so incredible. So the French section, which is what I studied at university, they sent 39 women behind the lines. And the reason they did that, obviously women weren't allowed to be involved in active conflict, but France was in a very difficult situation. It was occupied most of. The sort of able-bodied men of working age had been deported to work camps around Europe particularly in Germany. So it was very difficult for men to move around in France undetected. They were very obvious man of a certain age really stuck out like a sore thumb. It was much easier for a woman to move around and. Not become the focus of suspicion, which is really why they had the idea, a very controversial idea of sending women behind the lines. And I was just enthralled to these women that they are just, they were just so brave. They did some incredible things. But I was also, I was equally as interested in what happened in the immediate post-war period where. Became clear how shambolic an organization SOE had been, how many things they had got wrong, the absolutely appalling consequences of those mistakes. 39 women went behind the lines and they suffered just horrific, brutal deaths in concentration camps and. The reason they were caught in the first place. The reason they were rounded up and sent to the camps was because of the incompetence of the people of the British authorities, the people who sent them to France in the first place. So I was really fascinated by this side of SOE that I just hadn't seen covered in fiction before. There's quite a few novels that look at women's secret agents. Not, I haven't seen any that really look at that side of it, of everything that went wrong in France for SOE, it was so shambolic. And also this sort of desperate search that went on from sort of 19 45, 19 46 for missing SOE agents because they had just vanished. The liberation of the camps was chaotic in its own way. The allies split off when they liberated the camps and the women's camp in Germany, Ravens Brook which is about sort of 45 minutes outside Berlin, was liberated by the Russians, and that was where several SOE women had been sent. It was very difficult to get any information. That camp from the Russians the rest of the allies. So it was just this sort of frantic search for survivors. So yeah, that's yeah, that's really what drew me to write about it.

Brett Benner 14:27

How long did the book take you to write?

Lori Inglis Hall 14:29

Writing a first draft probably took me about a year. I actually started writing it in 2016. I wrote five or six chapters and then thought, I'm not interested in this. It's not, it's just not working for me and. I just put it to one side and then in 2020 when we were locked down for the first time, had quite a bit of time on my hands and

Brett Benner 14:55

you weren't making bread like everyone else.

Lori Inglis Hall 14:57

I know, this is why I never mastered sourdough, because I remember this instead. I was still, I was working and I was working from home and, trying to homeschool my children. I guess maybe I just needed something else away from the, stress of that. And I found this folder on my computer called Tessa and Theo. And I found these chapters, and this time something just clicked in my head. And interestingly, quite a lot of what was in those rejected chapters ended up in the final book. So they obviously weren't that bad after all. But yeah, I, yeah, it took me about a year to write. I was really lucky in that I had studied. This area and read about it so intently that it was almost already in my head a lot of the, a lot of the research. And even that, even if I, it wasn't in my head, I knew where to go to get it. But revising it and editing it took quite a long time. Quite it took me quite a while to get the structure right of this novel. I think I pulled this apart and puzzled it back together. Every which way every possible way I could. So yeah, a couple of years, but not too bad. And then quite extensive editing with my agent on my editors when I got a deal.

Brett Benner 16:11

When you were doing your research, was there anything that stood out or surprised you that you found?

Lori Inglis Hall 16:16

That it wasn't a bigger deal at the time. I mean it, what part of it was when it, it came out in public that women had been deployed, find enemy lines. It was a huge sensation in this country. It was front page news, particularly the brutal deaths of a one particular group of SOE women at Nat via concentration camp. But. I suppose the sort of shambolic, way of working that s oe had, particularly this I, they had, I mean my novel is fiction, but a lot of it is taken from real history. So in my novel there's a lot of rumors that there is a double agent at work behind the lines and that is very much something that happened. In France, there was an agent called Re deo, who people on the ground had suspicions of from the off, they could just tell that there was something dodgy about this guy. And he was put in a really unique position. So SOE worked in all these sort of different networks and they were all separate. They're in different parts of France and they all had a similar structure, but the very important idea was that they didn't. Other, so if one fell, there was no cross contamination. They didn't all fall down, but Deo worked across networks. So he was in charge of arranging to meet agents when they were parachuted. Under the cover of Darkness into France, which meant that he worked across networks. He was also responsible for getting letters from agents' homes, smuggling them home, which meant that he had access to their most private thoughts, their private information. That was very valuable if you were gonna capture someone and maybe blackmail them or just, make them think that they've already been betrayed. To make them talk. So he was in a very unique position, which caused a few worries from people on the ground. And then he did extraordinary things like he, his apartment in Paris was next to a senior German official. And people were saying like, who would put themselves and that position and there's hiding in plain sight and then there's just being really stupid. And then of course as soon as he came onto the scene, people started getting rounded up and, but people on the ground who had these concerns about this man were reporting everything back to London. They were saying, there is something not right about this man. We are really worried things are that people are being arrested because of him. We think he's the leak. And they did nothing. They ignored it. They did a very kind of wishy-washy investigation and decided it was totally fine and he wasn't totally fine. So nothing really happened with that. He was put on trial after the war. He was acquitted. The only person from SOE who came to his trial was a man called Nicholas Boddington, who also, there were quite significant doubts about his loyalty during the war. And he went to or DE's trial and he spoke up for him, and Deo got off. So there was never really any comeback on this. This man sent. Countless people to their deaths during the war and got away totally scot-free. So I was just really interested that wasn't more of a sensation at the time, more of a scandal. It got brushed under the carpet and that's really where this idea of not really being able to trust anyone, not really being able to trust the narrative that is being being spun at the end of the war by the authorities and the way we perceive history and its relationship to. The truth of what actually happened in the past. Because obviously there is always a dominant narrative that plays out and that becomes our history. That becomes fact. But it doesn't always have much to do with the truth of what actually happened. So yeah, I was, yeah, that's really, I was really shocked by that. But I think, Britain was in, was a mess after the war. It had been through. A lot people had really suffered in this country for a long time and they were tired and they just wanted their lives back. So I think there was concerted effort at the end of the war by government to move on. We're gonna move on now, we're gonna put this behind us and we're on to the next thing. And I think that created a very. Fertile ground for things to be swept under the carpet and not examined in a way that maybe they should have been

Brett Benner 21:00

you sound like you're describing the current situation in the United States right now. Unfortunately.

Lori Inglis Hall 21:07

Yeah. Yeah. So when I first started writing this in 2016 I guess I didn't really expect. That the events in would have such resonance with our current times.

Brett Benner 21:20

Oh my God., Yeah, there's a page that I pulled up. And this is when Tessa is, already in in place. Who, first of all, she's such an incredible character. And I have to say on the sidebar, like what I loved so much about following her journey is that. You put her in that time and place and we are literally experiencing all of this as she's experiencing it. And by that I mean there's so much confusion that's going on of who is who and what is what and where am I? And things get messed up and information doesn't get disseminated correctly. And who do you trust and how do you stay? Undercover effectively. And it's thrilling when you're reading it, but also terrifying because. You really don't know who you can trust, but there's a part here that says Tess's eyes track two enemies. Now the gray uniform of the Ss and the dark blue of the Vichy police, although the real danger is those who hide behind plain clothes as she dismounts her head is turned by a frack in the square. A man is being marched from his market stall, twisting his body against the hands that bundle him into a black car. He looks like anyone and no one fifties. Gray hair and a slight stoop, not someone who normally draw the eye. A woman shouts, leave him be, and the men go back and grab her too. Dragging her screaming by her wrists, her knees scraping across the paving stones. Everyone stops for the few slow seconds it takes for this incident transpire, and then everyone carries on with their shopping as if. Nothing happened. No one wants to be seen as interested or concerned, or worse angry because look where it gets you. This just resonated me, unfortunately, so much because of everything that's happening in this country with ice and what we're witnessing going on. It just. When I was going back over my pages last night, it just really, the relevance and the pance and like you just said, the cyclical nature of things and what we don't learn, how we end up repeating again. But Tessa I think is such an amazing character and I love her strength. I love that she says somewhat in the kind of the middle of the book. To another character for her getting involved in this wartime effort was critical because she wanted to do something, she felt helpless and she didn't wanna think that only her brother should be able to get to do something noble and worthy for the cause. And I just, she's really, frankly, she's just such a bad ass She must have been fun to write.

Lori Inglis Hall 23:56

is. She was so fun to write. Yeah, she's just, she's who you wish you could be and that she's incredibly brave. She's always got equipped. She's always got the perfect comeback, which I am not like that. I'm someone who thinks of it like 20 minutes later when it's absolutely no good at all situation, and it's hard to imagine what it must have been like to just survive in that situation, in. If you look at the wrong person or you lock eyes with the wrong person, that could be it. It could be it, or it could just be your day for no reason at all. So just trying to imagine what it must have been like for the real people on the ground to exist in that level of pressure and tension where any moment could just be your last, you look at the wrong person, wrong a person wrong, you look eyes with the wrong person, or you have your papers inspected and. Today it's just, it's not good enough. Yesterday they were fine. Today they're not and off you go. So just to live with that level of uncertainty and to be that unnerved all the time, I just, it's almost impossible to imagine what it must have been like for people on the ground. But it was so interesting trying to think about what it must have been like when I was writing. The character of Tessa who just experiences all these extraordinary situations and has to just be constantly thinking on her feet and always having, always have a way out I can't, I just can't imagine how exhausting it must be for a start just to, to live as someone else. It's really, it's months that she's in France undercover. But it must have felt, for the real women, it must have felt like years.

Brett Benner 25:47

Eternity. Yeah. So much of this book, too obviously is about secrets and the secrets that the twins keep from each other. And Theo has no idea. That Tessa, where Tessa is or what she had become even so much this quiet. And one of the other things I'm just so interested is we learned fairly early on, so I don't really think this is a spoiler, that Theo is gay and, this is his own kind of thing. He's hiding. What made this decision for you in terms of the character choice?

Lori Inglis Hall 26:16

I liked the idea of them both having secrets, both having something that they are keeping from each other, because Tessa doesn't just have the fact that she's joined up with SOE, she's got a pretty big secret that she's been keeping from Theo for quite. Quite a long time really caused this distance between them. But yeah, I was fascinated by, separate gender, sort of social history of gay men during that period. Which came from a really I was reading up about this man called Trevor Thomas. Who was a curator of a local museum where I grew up. He was a curator in the forties, and he helped get a lot of degenerate artists, them outta Germany. And I never quite understood why this museum in Leicester, a very small city in the middle of the, of England, had this incredible art collection. And it was only later on that I was reading about this man that I realized it was because he had reached out and had really saved so many. Artists, but you wouldn't know that really because he's only known randomly as Sylvia Pla, downstairs neighbor in London. And when she took her life, he was, the man that she was a infamously asked for a box of matches and he was knocked out by the gas. So that's how I got his name. And then I just ended up reading about him. I was like, oh my God, I have this like weird almost connection to him. And the reason he is not known as this incredible ator is because he was arrested in a public toilet with another man. He hadn't done anything with this man. They were just in there at the same time. But a policeman said that he read a look between them and they were arrested and he lost everything. He lost his career. Discounted for nothing because of this one transgression. So I was really just horrified reading that. And that sort of ended up reading a lot more about, about what gay men went through during those years in particular. So it was really struck by the similarities of what it must have been to be a gay man in this period, the way it's, similar to what Tessa is experiencing in France, in that you cannot really trust. Anyone with your true self, a look, just a look can be enough to change the course of your life. So I, yeah, the parallels that really struck me, and that's, and that kind of ended up becoming quite a large part of Theo's story who I loved writing by the way, which sort of, not that I had anything against Theo, but I guess so much of the story is focused on Tessa, that it came. Of came upon me by surprise, just how I absolutely fell in love with Theo. I loved writing him as a, I don't wanna give any spoilers away, but there's a version of the story that exists where, we meet up with him in late life and he's totally fine. Everything worked out amazingly for Theo and someone read it and went, is that realistic? Is that the best sort of choice for the novel? So I, yeah. It was hard make the.

Brett Benner 29:33

Yeah, my experience of the book is, we go through this trajectory of the two of them together in the beginning and then them partying, and it's really, so much of the bulk of it becomes her story. He bookends it. And his, the kind of last third of the book is really so much about him and the poignancy of all of this. And it really emotionally it really snuck up on me because I got towards the end and it was like one of those things where I, it caught, it caught in my throat because and again, don't wanna give anything away but it just, there was just a lot and there was a lot of layers and there was a lot of, the spoils of war, so to speak and how it impacts everyone in a variety of ways. It's really moving and great.

Lori Inglis Hall 30:17

Yeah, and it's, people in 1945, the world had been through such a extraordinary experience and an extraordinary global trauma, but we didn't have, pTSD didn't exist as a diagnosis back then. People were just expected to move on, get on with their lives, and there was really no outlet there was no therapeutic answer to the way people were seeing. It was just feeling, it was just buried. It was just, and I saw that really with my own granddad who never spoke about his experiences. In the Second World War. But from what we have heard with very sort of vague stories that have come out, he experienced some absolutely horrific things. And I have no doubt that his reticence to talk about his experiences have bound up in, in a traumatic response to what he'd seen. And I think that was incredibly common. And still, yeah, all these people who just. Were just never able to deal with the things they had seen because it was just not possible for them to do

Brett Benner 31:26

yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. This is something we don't have to put on the podcast. This is more my own curiosity because it is so cinematic. Have the rights been sold?

Lori Inglis Hall 31:37

Not yet, but it's.

Brett Benner 31:40

okay, then we're leaving it in. We're leaving this in. No. 'cause I'm like, yeah, no, it's a, it seems like such a no-brainer to me. Like somebody, it, it has, so many of these incredible elements that somebody should be snapping this thing up. I'm just putting that out there right now.

Lori Inglis Hall 31:57

Fingers crossed.

Brett Benner 31:59

Yeah, no, it's great. Laurie, this has been wonderful. But please everybody by the book by independent if you can. But really it's really fantastic. So congratulations so much on all of it. if you'd like today's conversation or other conversations that you've heard on Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. And if you have the time, what will be really helpful to me is give the show five stars on your podcast platform of choice. And also if you have time to leave a review, that would be really incredible to help other people who aren't familiar with the podcast discover it. Thanks so much for listening. I will be back next week with another episode. In the meantime, you can always find me at Brett's book stack on Instagram, YouTube, or now on Substack as well. So look for me there and I hope you all have a great week. And as always, thanks for listening.