Q&A with Claire Anderson-Wheeler

Meet Claire Anderson-Wheeler, author of glittering murder mystery The Gatsby Gambit.

Tell us in your own words about The Gatsby Gambit.

It’s a mystery story that’s more than just a romp. I modeled it on some of the Golden Age mysteries that I loved, and at face value it has a bit of that Agatha Christie feel (though our sleuth is probably a quarter of Miss Marple’s age!). But I wanted to do more than write a whodunnit. The word gambit means a risky strategy designed to gain an advantage, but in chess it has a specific meaning which is about sacrificing something of value in order to get what you want. In The Gatsby Gambit I was interested in unpacking some of those ideas about sacrifice, loss and compromise.  

As you dig deeper into the novel, you start to see some of the uglier aspects of the romanticized world of the Roaring Twenties. I wanted to take a closer look at that era we associate with social progress and jolly parties, and at 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published, it’s an interesting time to hold up a mirror and think about how far we’ve come.

Tell us about the character of Greta. Did any real women from the era inspire her?

I love Greta! One of my earliest readers described her as having “moxy”, and that is still my favorite characterisation of her. I think she’s an interesting character because she’s grown up living between two worlds: she has been sent to the “best” schools and coached to fit into the upper echelons of society, but at the same time she operates under a kind of outsider status due to the humble background she shares with her brother Jay, which he has tried so hard to erase.

To a large extent she lives within a bubble of privilege, and has grown up with a lot of unquestioned assumptions about the world. But she’s trying very hard to break through that bubble, and decode the more subtle truths about the world around her.

She’s mainly pure invention, but while writing her I did keep in mind some of her idols, such as journalists Nelly Bly and Annie Laurie, who were huge pioneers in their day, not just as careerwomen and courageous journalists, but as voices of conscience who spoke up against some grave injustices of the era. I also thought of Zelda Fitzgerald a lot, although I don’t see Greta as a Zelda figure. But I tried to channel her a bit more when thinking about other female characters, namely Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan. 

When did you first read The Great Gatsby, and why is it a novel that’s stayed with you?

I read it on holiday the summer I was fourteen. It was such a short, slim novel, I didn’t expect it to do much! But I became so immersed in it, and felt a strange restlessness when I got to the last page. It felt like it had all ended too soon, and that I needed to go back to the beginning and read it all again, only slower and more carefully! There’s something about the novel that makes you want to revisit it. It feels true on some deep level, the way myths and fairy tales feel archetypally true. And it’s about such universal things - beauty and truth and loss and self-deception.

In your author’s note, you write about wondering what a female character might notice that Nick Carraway doesn’t. What were those?

Nick Carraway of course is our perspective on The Great Gatsby; it’s through his eyes that we observe the world. He’s a wonderful narrator and comes across as a broad-minded individual. But he is also a man from a well-pedigreed background, so he is on the right side of the gender and class and race power systems. Inevitably, there are things he takes for granted. Greta’s experience is also skewed towards privilege, but as a woman in the 1920s, she has more cause to notice (and resent) the ways that society restricts her freedoms, and from there, she starts noticing the ways that society restricts other people’s freedoms, too - much more harshly, in some cases, than it restricts hers.

Being a woman, she also has opportunities for interaction that Nick doesn’t necessarily have. Women were expected to move in the domestic sphere, and absent a more senior figure, Greta functions as the woman of the house. This makes it normal for her to spend time “below stairs”, talking with the servants. She is far more aware of their realities than her brother is. She is also more likely to be underestimated or overlooked: whereas Nick and Jay, as men, are expected to hold forth and be center stage, it is much easier for Greta to slip away unnoticed.

The Great Gatsby still resonates in the modern day. Why do you think the fascination endures, and are there any lessons or learnings we should be taking from the book?

In The Great Gatsby, there’s a sense of peeking in on a world of extraordinary glamor and luxury. It’s probably the same instinct that draws people towards celebrity magazines! But also, it’s a deep critique of the culture that insulates and romanticises that kind of elitism and social disconnect. Unfortunately, we’ll probably have a lot to learn from that for the forseeable future.