[In the following interview, Fraser discusses her writing life and her crime fiction.]

During an early spring evening in London, when the daffodils in the square across the way are just beginning to blossom, Lady Antonia Fraser opens the door of her Kensington home to PW. On the occasion of the U.S. publication of her short story anthology, Jemima Shore's First Case … and of her new Jemima Shore novel Your Royal Hostage in England, the author talks about her varied writing career, as well as her life as wife, daughter and mother in a celebrated literary family.

While pouring tea from a silver service in her graciously furnished sitting room, Fraser tells us that writing came naturally to the eldest daughter in the family known fondly in Britain as "the literary Longfords." Her father, Lord Longford, was an Oxford don and a prolific writer (later a politician), and her mother, Elizabeth Longford, is the biographer of queens Victoria and Elizabeth II, as well as Byron, Wellington and others. Fraser's siblings, too, include writers: her sister Rachel Billington is a successful novelist; another sister, Judith Kanzantzis, is a poet; her brother Thomas Pakenham is a historian. Asked when she first began to write, Fraser replies modestly, "I just always wrote. And if I didn't write I wouldn't be able to do anything else. I'm not full of amazing talents."

Although writing was clearly "in the atmosphere" during Fraser's childhood, she doesn't recall it as being the chief preoccupation of her household. Politics were discussed more frequently by her "family of talkers." Her father changed from Conservative to Labour politics and then thrust another conversion upon family life by becoming a Catholic. At 14, Fraser chose to follow his lead and converted to Catholicism.

While today Fraser radiates upper-class graciousness, she is absolutely unpretentious. Perhaps this is largely due to the fact that she did not perceive herself, in growing up, as being a member of the upper class. Born Antonia Pakenham in 1932, she was "brought up as the daughter of a don—even if he was Lord Longford." She attended the famous Dragon School in Oxford where girls were admitted only if they were the siblings of enrolled boys, and then went on, initially as a Protestant, to an upper-crust convent school. She later used the convent's setting and gothic atmosphere to advantage in her first mystery novel, Quiet as a Nun, featuring her sleuth Jemima Shore.

After completing her education at Oxford, Fraser took an entry-level position at Weidenfeld publishers. They later published her first books, which were histories of dolls and toys, as well as her highly successful biography of Mary, Queen of Scots and those that followed. At 23, she married Sir Hugh Fraser, a dashing war hero. Like her mother, who delayed her writing career to bring up a large family, Fraser put off literary pursuits in favor of raising her six children and supporting her husband's political career.

When she did begin writing in earnest, her literary family proved invaluable to her. Her mother was a significant critic for her five historical volumes, which was a "tremendous advantage," Fraser says. As Fraser's children reached adulthood, and some—predictably—became writers, they too provided appreciated critiques, particularly regarding Fraser's fiction. "My oldest daughter, Rebecca, who has a biography of Charlotte Brontë coming out in the fall, has a very good eye, and it works well for me because she is absolutely frank. There's something about being frank to your mother that she enjoys," Fraser adds with a smile. (Fraser's second daughter, Flora, has just published a biography of Emma, Lady Hamilton.)

Fraser's second husband, the eminent playwright Harold Pinter, whom she married in 1980, is also "a terrific help" in making small, key suggestions, she says. Although their work is quite different, the Pinters are a congenial literary couple who entertain a wide circle of literary friends. They customarily work in separate studies but are capable of writing in the same room when the occasion demands. "Once we worked in the same room when we had a hotel suite by the sea," Fraser recalls. "I was very surprised. Harold never seemed to do anything at all. He'd read the Guardian, the cricket scores. He'd walk about, silently. He'd light a black Sobranie. And at the end of it, he'd written a play! I'd been typing away furiously, and at the end of it, I'd written half a chapter!"

Not only does Fraser find it easy to work in the company or at least the vicinity of another writer, she is able to keep her own two disparate areas of writing, "history and mystery, as I think of them," comfortably unmuddled. "I'm not particularly tidy outside of my mind. I live in a great, happy clutter, and I like it. But I think I have a very, very, tidy mind. I practically don't need a filing cabinet."

With or without the benefit of a filing cabinet, Fraser's historical work, which put her career on the map, has been acclaimed for its grounding in extensive and accurate research. She is credited with bringing a lively personal voice to the previously dry and donnish field of historical writing. This has made her books, however long, appeal to an audience stretching far beyond the usual academic sphere. Fraser humanizes her subjects by bringing in personal detail and character development. She is also a crusader for those who might otherwise be lost in history, particularly women. Her latest historical volume, The Weaker Vessel, celebrates the courage of women in 17th century England. She depicts a panoply of women from all classes facing life and death issues in childbirth, as well as crises in political, social and personal life.

Despite the fact that she was able to bring a personal style to the writing of history, in the mid-'70s Fraser "felt that there was something in myself that history didn't express." She gave in to the impulse to write fiction and created the TV commentator/sleuth Jemima Shore, a stylish, liberated woman who shares some of the author's characteristics. "I gave her all of my private tastes, such as white wine and flowers and Jean Muir clothes and [a] love of cats. On the other hand, she is in some ways very much unlike me. She drives fast cars, for instance, while I am a tortoise."

Fraser's crime novels are written in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins and P. D. James, writers she admires enormously. She didn't consciously set out to update the traditional detective novel with a sleek, sophisticated female sleuth but she was concerned to "put a female presenter [commentator] in the television screen when no such woman existed in England. I go a lot to the States, and I had noticed the power of Barbara Walters and how everybody recognized her. I thought that having a sleuth in such a position would make it possible for people in all sorts of trouble to confide in her," Fraser comments.

Fraser "turned to crime" during a time of crisis in her own life. "I've asked myself why I did start writing crime at that time. I always used to parry this question because I didn't want to talk about my personal life. But now, looking back on it, I think to have a marriage of 20 years break up and begin a whole new life, and to start writing fiction for the first time—well, if I were an historian I would say 'These things have to be connected.' And I think perhaps I'd always wanted to write amusingly; perhaps there was that in me that could never be freed in my historical work." Indeed, Fraser's mysteries, several of which have been made into TV episodes, have been consistently hailed as entertaining. "I wrote Oxford Blood at a time when I was extremely depressed, for good reason. My former husband, the father of my children, had just died, young and painfully, so if ever I had a bad time…. And yet here comes a novel that everybody kindly describes as being very jolly."

Like many other crime writers, Fraser finds power over life and death within the murder mystery appealing. She adds, "I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order. I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of my people. People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police."

With Your Royal Hostage, to be published here in January 1988, Fraser makes her departure from Norton, the publisher which has published all of her crime fiction here to date. She has found Norton to be a very agreeable publisher but feels that a change to a house with a definite mystery list might help Jemima Shore reach a larger audience. "Atheneum and Scribners look to have a very exciting mystery list," she says of her future U.S. publisher, "and I wanted to be a part of it."

Fraser has always published her history here with Knopf, believing in the advice of her agent, Michael Shaw, of Curtis Brown, who counseled her to publish history and fiction with different publishers in the States. The arrangement has worked out well, and, unlike some British authors whose English houses strongly advise them where to "farm out" their work to American publishers, Fraser has always made her own decisions in this matter.

In both history and fiction, Fraser makes no particular changes in her writing for the American audience, relying on American editors to clarify necessary points for us. She strongly believes that American editing is superior to the English. "English publishers say that the Americans nit-pick, but I like that. I say, 'Better for the publisher to nit-pick than the reviewer.' There's a nun, you know, in Quiet as a Nun, who is always quoting Wordsworth. The American editor checked all the Wordsworth quotations and came up with some howlers. And you know, I thought I knew my Wordsworth."

For some time Fraser has taken an active and leading role in writers' organizations, campaigning for authors' rights and helping to win the successful battle for the Public Lending Right, which now brings money to authors based on the frequency with which their books are used in libraries. She is also determined that writers should have approval rights on jacket design, that they should receive a greater percentage of paperback earnings, and that they have the right to be informed of the print run on their books. "Here, if you know the print run, it's because your editor weakened or got drunk," she jokes. Presently, she devotes her efforts to another kind of authors' rights, civil liberties, as chairman of the English PEN Writers in Prison Committee. "That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing," she says.

Fraser has also recently begun reviewing crime fiction in a monthly column for the London Daily News. She believes crime writing attracts some of the best talent in writing today. Why? "Possibly, the novel became too experimental; but I think just as when Bjorn Borg from nowhere in Sweden became a tennis star, and everybody in Sweden took up tennis, in the same way, the success of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell attracts more writers of quality to crime fiction." Perhaps Fraser's success will inspire new writers too.