Susanna Gregory biography

Susanna Gregory is a pseudonym. Before gaining her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she was a police officer in Yorkshire. She has written a number of non-fiction books on architecture and travel as well as the chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew and Thomas Chaloner.

"I wrote the first Bartholomew book so long ago now that it’s hard to remember what prompted me to pick the mid-fourteenth century. However, I’ve always loved medieval history, and I think I just chose a time where a lot was happening. There were the wars with the French, and then along came the Black Death. It must have been a terrifying time, and it’s almost impossible to imagine what people must have felt about it. The early 1660s were much the same. The country had just endured two decades of internal turmoil, where first one side and then the other had the upper hand. No one really knew who was going to win or what was going to happen next, and the uncertainty must have been deeply unsettling. Both were periods of tremendous instability and change. I think that’s what attracted me to them."
Susanna Gregory, interviewed by Charlotte Betts, when asked what made her choose the medieval and then the mid-seventeenth century periods for her murder mystery novels