About Barbara



Montreal in 1967 was an eye-popping city for a young nerdess from Ontario suburbia. There was the swinging world’s fair “Expo ‘67” and French joie de vivre done Quebec freestyle. But I was there for a serious purpose. I’d come to the National Theatre School of Canada for classical theatre training. NTS accepts just fifteen or so acting students each year, and by audition only. I was thrilled to have made the cut.

How do you make God laugh? Make a plan. Preparing for a “distinguished stage career" I studied Shakespeare and Shaw, Moliere and Congreve, then spent the next twenty years mostly on TV: made-for-TV movies, series, sit-coms, and soap opera. Plus I did over a hundred TV and radio commercials. But I thorougly enjoyed all that TV work, and I did use my stage training too, performing in dozens of plays across Canada and in the US. I loved being an actor.

(I’m glad people now use “actor” to include both male and female performers. We don’t say “doctoress, lawyeress, teacheress” so why “actress?” Think the Academy Awards will ever join the twenty-first century by rethinking the phrase “best actress?” Note: this verbal gripe is notwithstanding my use of “nerdess” in my opening sentence above. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”)

A few highlights from my acting days:



“Vanities” with Dawn Wells (of “Gilligan’s Island”):
Stage West, Edmonton. Dawn became a good friend.		  
“Ring Around the Moon” with Thayer David: Seattle Repertory Theatre


“A Flea In Her Ear” with Wenna Shaw: Citadel Theatre, Edmonton 		  
 
Neil Simon's “Chapter Two”: Bayview Playhouse, Toronto

On the set of “The Campbells” TV series. I played Charlotte Logan, Inkeeper, for three seasons of this TV series about life in pioneer Canada in the 1880s. 
 		 Cover of TV Times with Bruce Gray, for “High Hopes." I starred in this daytime drama (aka soap opera).  I loved doing this series.

 		    



At home with my daughter and husband - my best roles. These pictures are old (my beautiful and talented daughter has kids of her own now) but I love them.

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In the late 1980’s I began writing fiction. My first efforts were awful: pretentious short stories with high-flown language and no point (worse, no drama.) But I learn fast. I finally wrote a good short story called "Nightshoot."  It won 1st prize in the 1989 Dorothy Shoemaker Literary Award Competition. That same year the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me a grant that allowed me to take a sabbatical from acting to write my first novel.

I’ll be forever grateful for that support. Like everyone, I hate paying taxes, but other people’s taxes gave me the opportunity to write the book that launched my writing career, so to my fellow Canadians I say “Thank you.” And I hope that, in turn, my annual contributions to the public purse are now helping another fledgling artist.

I worked for three years on that first book, an historical novel titled Heresy, learning as I wrote. (Translation: steeling myself to hack apart draft after draft until I’d finally crafted a book good enough to send out to agents.) Set in the court of King Henry VIII, Heresy featured Honor Larke, a (fictional) ward of (the real) Sir Thomas More. More was a brilliant scholar and a loving father, but as chancellor of England he banned books and burned men. The story turns on Honor’s passionate conflict with her once-beloved guardian as she tries to save More’s victims.

Heresy attracted the interest of Albert Zuckerman, a top New York literary agent. Al has been my agent ever since. I can’t speak highly enough of him. He helps me create every new book, from outline to final draft, generously sharing his literary wisdom and book-business savvy. There are two people I rely on to write my novels: Al, and my husband, Stephen. They both tell the truth, nothing but the truth.

Al sold Heresy to Penguin USA. They published it in 1994 under their Onyx imprint, but not before insisting on a title change. “No one will know what ‘heresy’ means,” they said. (At which point I thought that the dumbing-down of our culture had hit a knuckle-dragging low.) So, my big-themed historical epic was published as A Dangerous Temptation with a sweet, romance-type cover. Penguin also bought the sequel set during the brutal Wyatt rebellion against Queen Mary and published it the following year as A Dangerous Devotion with equally sweet cover art. So those books never found their real audience.

I decided to write thrillers. And to write them under a male pen-name 'Stephen Kyle.' My thinking was: they can’t put flowers on the cover. Not that I’m bitter. I’m not a vengeful person. Although I do confess to wreaking my share of havoc in my novels. At last count, I’ve killed 27 really nice characters who weren’t doing a thing wrong, 19 nasty types who were, and 430,000 innocent bystanders. I’ve burned them at the stake and hanged them. I’ve drained their blood with hemorrhagic fevers, and zapped their brains with electrical eruptions from space-based missions gone awry. I’ve tortured them to death and driven them to suicide. A healthy outlet, don’t you think? But there may be a price: my husband warns of a purgatory in store for me, where the souls of all the innocent characters I’ve murdered will hound me until the end of time.

Warner Books published my first thriller, Beyond Recall, in 2000 and I was delighted with the big promotion they gave it. Bus and subway ads in New York, Chicago, Washington, etc. Full-page ads in Publishers Weekly that read: “Beyond Crichton, Beyond Cook, Beyond Recall.” Ads in Time magazine. As a result Beyond Recall sold very, very well. Warner Books signed me to write two more thrillers. I was on a happy roll.

Then capitalism reared its ravenous head. In a public spotlight takeover, AOL bought Time Warner, a conglomerate that included Warner Books, and in the ensuing cutbacks all the editorial people who were enthusiastic about my books were either given pink slips or moved on. So my next two thrillers After Shock and The Experiment ( which were damn good books) didn't get the in-house push they needed to really succeed. 

Which brings me to Audrey LaFehr. Audrey, a lovely and smart woman with a passion for good books, had been the editor at Penguin USA who'd bought that first historical novel of mine, Heresy,  way back in 1994. In fact, she'd told my agent that it was “the best historical novel she had ever read.” But back then she had little power in the company and so couldn't “push” the book into a priority position with the marketing dept.

Here's the story of its resurrection. Fast forward to February 2007 when I got an email out of the blue from Audrey who is now Editorial Director at Kensington Publishing, New York. She said that she’d just pulled the 1994 edition off her shelf for fun and reread it and fell in love with it all over again and wanted to publish it – “properly” this time. So Audrey bought the book and its sequel - again - and published the first in 2008 as THE QUEEN’S LADY in a gorgeous trade edition with an eye-catching cover. The sequel THE KING'S DAUGHTER came out in March 2009 to great reviews. I couldn’t be happier.

Actually, that's not quite true. I was even happier when Audrey signed me to write two more Tudor era novels. They'll be published in 2010 and 2011. I love writing of the Elizabethan period, whose "on the make" characters and life-and-death intrigues - to say nothing of the period's religious paranoia - speak deeply to our own time. 

I hope you'll agree, and will enjoy being caught up in the passions and setbacks, adventures and strivings of the Thornleigh family - Honor, Richard, Isabel, and Adam - as they befriend, and sometimes betray, their willful kings and queens.

Happy reading!