To fans of Star Wars tie-in novels Jude Watson is famous as the author of the bestselling Last of the Jedi and Jedi Apprentice series. As Judy Blundell, though, she is a complete unknown, and she was stunned at the news that her first standalone novel, What I Saw and How I Lied, had won America’s National Book Award.
‘When I got the call I literally could not speak,’ she says, adding with a smile, ‘I would never put that in a book; it’s such a cliché!’
‘I think Harold Augenbraum, the head of the National Book Foundation, thought I’d fainted. He kept saying “Jude? Jude?” I finally said, “Harold, are you sure?” And he said, “You’re Judy Blundell, aren’t you?”
‘When I got the call I literally could not speak’
What I Saw and How I Lied is a noirish mystery set in 1947, mainly in Palm Beach, Florida. 15-year-old Evie’s adored stepfather returns from the war and becomes a successful businessman until a mysterious stranger appears and Evie is forced to question everything she had thought she understood about her family and the world.
The novel combines quality writing with popular appeal, its page-turning suspense interwoven with a coming-of-age story. ‘Working as a writer for hire, which is what Star Wars is, and other tie-in books that I’ve done, I am very concerned with keeping the plot moving. It really teaches you how to do that,’ Blundell explains.
Whereas with this there’s not a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter - it’s not as obvious as that - but to compel the reader through the story is very important to me. It needs to be a compulsive read, while you’re also paying attention to things like sentences, language and character.
Blundell’s starting point for the book was a visual image of the naïve narrator, Evie. ‘Evie I knew right down to the bone from the beginning. Then I scribbled a lot of notes. I came up with the psychological dynamic of her story; what the relationship with her mother was, the fact that her stepfather had gone to war and how she felt about him.
'I knew that war had damaged the stepfather in some way, and then I read about the gold train and it just really popped for me – that thread just came together with this thread.’
'The gold train happened near the end of the war because the Jews weren’t herded into camps until the very end in Hungary. They had to give up everything. The Germans loaded it all on a train and sent it to Berlin, but it never made it because the Allies were pushing too fast.
'The Americans finally got hold of it and they didn’t know what to do with it so they brought it to Salzburg and put it in a warehouse. Some of it was looted by American officers. This worked for my story because here’s this guy guarding this big warehouse full of stuff. This man who just came through the Depression and who worked two jobs just to make it, thinking: “These people are dead – they’re going to miss this?” It was a temptation.’
The warehouse guard is not the only one with a moral dilemma: every major character in the novel, Evie included, ultimately has something to hide. With adultery, blackmail and murder among the secrets revealed, What I Saw and How I Lied could easily have been published on an adult list; in fact, Blundell’s editor initially wondered whether perhaps it should be.
The author, though, always envisaged her book as one for teenagers. ‘I did. Absolutely; because Evie was so strong to me, and I really felt that this was a book about coming to terms with adulthood and about being plunged into adulthood, and to me that’s a classic young adult theme.
‘You can have a really strong character influenced by the times who has a revelation that what they’re seeing is wrong, like Evie does, but you can’t just plop a person with modern sensibilities into that time and make it believable. You’ve got a line to walk where you can’t sound contemporary, because the book is told through the eyes of my main character, but yet it has to appeal to a contemporary teenager and a contemporary reader, and I did feel that the themes of the book and the psychology of the book were very relatable to a contemporary teenager; very much so.’
She also found the era an interesting one in which to explore the transition from childhood to adulthood. ‘The word teenager just started to become a concept in the late 40s. It really kicked in in the 50s, of course, when there was a real teenage culture.’
‘The more I read about the late 40s, the more that became an element of the story that I wanted to include. So it all fell into place, and all of a sudden it seems like it was awfully clever of me to think of doing a film noir with a teenager, but it took me a while to realise I was writing in that vein.
'Then I thought: “Of course, it’s film noir! I have a blond, and I have a mysterious stranger, an empty hotel, it’s out of season, and everybody in the book has a secret.” That was really important to me. Because I think that’s another paradigm of coming into adulthood: not knowing the adult world.
'Adults are having these conversations and you don’t really know what they’re saying. There’s a scene in the book where Evie overhears Joe berating Bev and saying, “Why did you sell ties?” And she’s half understanding it, but they’re speaking truth to each other behind a closed door. Isn’t that the way we always found out the truth when we were kids? By overhearing adults.’
Blundell handles Evie’s growth to awareness with great skill. She admits that it was a challenge to make her narrator believably innocent, but not irritatingly so.
‘It wasn’t easy. But one of the things that will bring the reader through is that developing feeling of first love. That’s one of the suspense pulls, and, let’s face it, she was very innocent as far as all that area of life. Her mother kept her that way for whatever motivations she had. I think that probably is pretty common.’
Clearly, Blundell feels an emotional attachment to Evie. In her first draft she wrote the climactic courtroom scene as a newspaper article rather than through Evie’s eyes in order to protect herself from how her protagonist would have been feeling.
During the writing of the book she even changed her working methods so she could remain on Evie’s wavelength.
I’m usually a meticulous outliner, where I know every beat in the story. You have to be as a genre writer. I’m also a meticulous rewriter. My process in the morning is to get up and rewrite what I did the day before as a little warm-up into the work.
'This book I did not allow myself to rewrite. For the most part I didn’t write with chapter breaks. I just wrote the whole thing, which made the second draft much more difficult, and even though it was absolute agony I’m doing my next book the same way.
‘It’s hard when you go over and over and over things, but I just felt I would kill it if I went over it too many times; I would smother it. I wanted this book to be emotional, and a compulsion. If I didn’t feel that compulsion writing it I was afraid that the reader wouldn’t feel it reading it. So I was very concerned with staying in tune with Evie’s emotions. As long as I had the emotional arc down, I felt I would be okay.’
