What's The Tea. A guest post from Clare Broyles.

RHYS BOWEN: As you read this my daughter Clare is staying with me and we're plotting together. Not how to get rid of my husband or her husband, but our next Molly book. Clare is the researcher par excellence and is coming up with great plot ideas for us, from reading the New York Times for every day we want to write about. I'll let her tell you what she's thinking:

CLARE BROYLES: What's the Tea.

A few years ago I had to ask my teen age children what those words meant. I was tickled to learn that spilling the tea means telling the latest gossip. I love that the modern slang sounds so archaic. It reminds me of Oscar Wilde characters elegantly serving up scandal with their cucumber sandwiches.

                And scandals are ripe grounds for mystery writers. We all know they can be deadly. In fact, in Molly Murphy’s 1900’s New York the press was just as eager to get their hands on a scandal as they are today. And people were just as eager to read about them.

                It’s June, so I am in California with Rhys, starting the research for the next Molly book. For those of you who have not read the series; Molly Murphy came to New York as a young women in the early 1900’s. After twenty-two novels full of many mysteries we have arrived in October 1909 to begin Molly 23. As I always do, I am reading the New York Times for each day in which the book takes place. And what am I looking for? The tea! The gossip and scandal of the day.

Every morning I read the paper from 1909, and in the afternoon I come back to my own time period. It can be jarring going back and forth between gossip from 1909 to gossip from 2025. 1n October 1909 it was front page news when a poet called out the prime minister’s wife declaring her, “The Woman with the Serpent’s Tongue.” In 2025 P Diddy made Jane piece her nipples. 1n 1909 Miss Adah Durlacher of New York married  the Marquis de Fauconcourt on Saturday only to receive a letter on Tuesday from the owner of Fauconcourt to say they had seen the announcement of her marriage and there was no such person as the Marquis de Fauconcourt. She swore to stand by him anyway. In 2025 an accident reconstructionist is proving that there is no way John O’Keefe could have cut his arm on the back taillight of Karen Read’s car. Looks like a police coverup to me!



Research is such a rabbit hole. I can’t stop! Now I am back in 1909 with a man named Lord Montagu protesting that he is being wrongfully accused of running away with Lady Crofton, when it is a much younger (and more handsome) Montagu who is actually the culprit!

                What is it about us as a society that gossip and scandal are a form of entertainment? I have to admit that I follow the stories above with fascination. Is it a type of Schadenfreude – a gladness that we are not the ones whose lives are on display? Is it the same guilty pleasure that makes me watch Hoarders to feel that my house is very clean and My 600 Pound Life to feel that I am in pretty good physical shape? Or is it a natural curiosity about how human beings try to gain power and influence in their own sphere and then experience deep distress when that position is lost? Saving face and maintaining our position in whatever society we occupy is a primal human need. We know that our survival often depends on it.

What about you? Have you ever felt the hot, prickly shame of having done something that you hope no one ever finds out?  It doesn’t have to be a scandal worthy of the New York Times but just a bad decision. Have you ever cracked a friend’s china or stained their coach with red wine and wanted to slink away unnoticed? Then you have felt that uncomfortable sensation, and a wish that you could go back in time five minutes and undo the damage, afraid they will never invite you back.

As I begin my research, the scandals are what catch my attention because scandal, whether in polite or impolite society, can be a serious business. One question Rhys and I have to ask is, “Would someone be willing to kill to avoid a scandal?”

                And from the pages of the New York Times to the myriad of true crime television and podcasts, the answer is a resounding yes.

RHYS: I don't think we dare ask for confessions. I'm certainly not confessing (not that I ever spilled red wine on a friend's couch and I'm sure Clare didn't either!)