Yorkshire-born Marjorie Eccles is no stranger to period dramas. She’s also no stranger to a good mystery. The author of over 20 novels, her latest, The Firebird’s Feather (out from Severn House on December 1), follows a young woman tangled up in a murder in Edwardian London. We talked to Eccles about the East End, her young heroine and why everyone these days is so into those Edwardians.

In The Firebird's Feather, sheltered 18-year-old Kitty Challoner has her world rocked when her mother is suddenly murdered. The crime drives Kitty to become an impromptu detective, sending her into the seedy underbelly of the city—the East End—where she begins unearthing her mother’s secret life.

Eccles, who now lives in Hertfordshire, said the idea for the novel came from, of all things, a family wedding. “The bride was of Russian descent,” Eccles explained, and this fact got her thinking about a specific period in English history, when, at the turn of the 20th century, there was a “huge influx” of Russian immigrants into London. A number of these immigrants settled in the rougher East End of the city and, Eccles said, their desperation to send money home, to their families struggling under an oppressive regime, “created a climate of lawlessness, violence and intrigue.”

The seediness of East London is juxtaposed, in the book, with the world of privilege that Kitty comes from; one, as Eccles puts it, where “the most [young women] were expected to wish for was to be married off quickly and advantageously.”

The author was drawn to this particular moment in time, she said, because of what was also happening with women’s suffrage. Eccles wanted to explore the “position of women in society at the time” and this was the period when women’s suffrage “came right to the fore.” While the suffragettes were the ones in the public eye, Eccles explained, women of all classes were “demanding their freedom at last, daring to throw off their inhibitions as well as their corsets.”

Furthermore, Eccles admits, she has always been a sucker for the Edwardian era. “We can look back now, with hindsight, to see that the point at which I’ve set my book was the beginning of the end of an era. It was the last fling for that small but opulent, extravagant, pleasure-loving section of society which the upper-class inhabited.”

Beyond that, Eccles is fascinated by the extremes of the period, as a time of great discovery coupled with intense inequality. “Motor cars, airplanes, telephones, talkies. One newspaper declared that never since the world began has so much been achieved, and yet it was still a period of great social contrast and exploitation. Immense wealth and extreme poverty were still with us.”

Any focus on the Edwardian era now, with shows like Downton Abbey achieving such wide appeal, may be thanks, Eccles feels, to a certain element of timing. Aside from the fact that the Edwardian era was a glamorous one—“beautiful clothes, rich food, splendid houses and an effortlessly luxurious life made possible by hordes of servants”—Eccles thinks we are “going through a period of nostalgia...possibly due to the Centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.” This anniversary, she believes, “has made people willing to look back more objectively to a more leisurely world that had different values.”

Learn more about The Firebird's Feather at Severn House.