Bryn Turnbull's "The Paris Deception," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Paris Deception: A Novel by Bryn Turnbull.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the first novel that I’ve written with fully fictional main characters, and when I started envisioning the novel I struggled with picturing my two main characters, Sophie and Fabienne. In my previous two books, I wrote historical heroines, meaning that I had photographs and newsreels to draw upon when picturing the character in my mind, but with this project I had difficulty envisioning the characters: they wavered on the edge of my mind’s eye, sometimes shifting into focus before blurring, frustratingly, once more.

I have Pedro Pascal to thank, in fact, for helping me solidify my characters. I was listening to an interview where he talked about developing scrapbooks to get himself into his character’s mindset, and I thought it sounded worth trying. In the course of developing my scrapbooks, I gravitated towards images that felt like one character or the other. I found their clothing – for Sophie, worn tweeds and pleated trousers; for Fabienne, rich velvets and flowing silks. Furniture for their apartments – a wrought-iron bed for Sophie, and a bathtub filled with pillows for Fabienne. The tools of their trades: palette knives and paintbrushes, coffee cups and champagne coupes. Finally, with a hundred different aspects of the characters down in the scrapbook I took a stab at their physical appearance.

To me, Sophie is Holliday Grainger, beautiful and strong with a cut-glass accent and victory curls. Having played queer historical heroines in the past, I think she would do wonderfully navigating the many levels on which Sophie has to hide her true self.

Fabienne, meanwhile, would be played to perfection by...[read on]

Visit Bryn Turnbull's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Paris Deception.

--Marshal Zeringue