Channelling Chanel by Bobbi Mumm

Bobbi Mumm is a mystery and thriller writer in Saskatoon, Canada where she works half-time as an event planner at the University of Saskatchewan. On the speaker’s bureau for UNICEF, Bobbi delivers presentations at dozens of schools every year. She speaks French fluently and continues her language studies. Married to a nuclear physicist, she has four children, two of whom are college-age. The twins remain at home.

Bobbi wrote her first novel, Cream with Your Coffin, and signed with a U.S. literary agent who is now (still) pitching Cream with Your Coffin to New York editors. Almost finished her second novel, thriller De Rigueur Mortis, Bobbi is already planning the second 1954 Paris thriller and thinking about a research trip.

 

Channelling Chanel

By Bobbi Mumm

 

As I do final revisions to my 1954 Paris thriller, De Rigueur Mortis, I spend a lot of time thinking about Coco Chanel.  The novel’s adventure revolves around Chanel and her Rue Cambon atelier and boutique. In 1954 Coco Chanel presented her first collection in fifteen years – she’d closed her premises when war was declared. She already had superstar status along with notoriety as a probable Nazi collaborator.  It took her very little time to regain her position as the premiere designer of haute couture. So what is it about Chanel that keeps us fascinated? Why do we still talk about her, a full hundred and two years after she opened her first hat shop in Paris? I think the legend that was Coco Chanel has three roots:

1)      Chanel’s Drive and Personality

From the age of twelve, Coco Chanel was raised in an orphanage where her father had abandoned her upon her mother’s death. The nuns taught her to sew, demanded self-discipline, and placed her in her first job at a hosiery shop. As well as these skills taught by the nuns, Coco Chanel had a natural energy and unnerving charisma that swept everyone along with her in the pursuit of her dreams.

2)      Chanel’s Talent and Vision

Coco Chanel revolutionized fashion. She proclaimed that clothing should be comfortable (an unfashionable idea) and that men should not be dressing women. Among Chanel’s many firsts:

Sunbathing: Chanel sported a sun-kissed visage in 1920. Until then, most women prized a milky-white complexion.

Trousers for women: Coco Chanel borrowed her lover’s trousers and wore them in public, naturally in the most chic manner possible.

Little Black Dress: Chanel, in 1926, released the first “Little Black Dress” as it came to be known.

Lipstick in a Swivel Tube: Before Chanel’s 1920’s innovation lipstick was in a pot. 

Quilted handbags, fake pearls, chains as jacket hem weights and as a visible accessory, knitted, comfortable fabrics for women, ballerina pumps… The list goes on.

3)      Chanel’s Notoriety and Scandal

Chanel lived for two things, love and her work. Her passion for the men in her life led her several times deep into scandal and, once, near-imprisonment. As a young woman she lived in the world of the demi-monde, the lover of a succession of several rich play-boys, some of them married. Later, during WWII, Chanel’s very public affair with a German officer and agent runner in Paris led her to be arrested after the war on charges of collaboration. Scholars have never agreed as to Chanel’s involvement as a spy, either only for the Germans or, as a double-agent, working for the French and British. I choose to believe the latter.

 

 

It is Chanel’s wartime activities that were of great interest to me as I wrote De Rigueur Mortis. In 1954, alleged wartime wrongdoing was still extremely divisive in Paris society. Throw into the mix the start of the Algerian revolution, France’s loss of Indo-China, and the throngs of young American’s seeking their muse in Paris and I had a lovely, tumultuous canvas on which to paint this mystery thriller.

Thank you to Kaye for this chance to write about what I love. So tell me, what do you find most interesting or inspiring about Coco Chanel?

Catacombs are Swell When You’re Wearing Chanel by Bobbi Mumm

Bobbi Mumm is a mystery and thriller writer in Saskatoon, Canada where she works half-time as an event planner at the University of Saskatchewan. On the speaker’s bureau for UNICEF, Bobbi delivers presentations at dozens of schools every year. She speaks French fluently and continues her language studies. Married to a nuclear physicist, she has four children, two of whom are college-age. The twins remain at home. Bobbi practices Karate, as do her kids.

In 2009 Bobbi wrote her first novel, Cream with Your Coffin. This past year, Bobbi signed with a U.S. literary agent who is now pitching Cream with Your Coffin to New York editors. Almost finished her second novel, thriller De Rigueur Mortis, Bobbi has fallen in love, all over again, with the mystery that is Paris.

Catacombs are Swell When You’re Wearing Chanel

By Bobbi Mumm

Twenty years ago, nothing, not even the laughing taunts of my French boyfriend, could persuade me to face my fear and enter the Catacombs of Paris. So what compelled me to swallow my terror and venture down there two summers ago? It wasn’t a great dose of courage or even a bit maturity acquired over two decades. 

I was, and still am, morbidly afraid of rats. And I’ve only seen two rats. Neither was here in Canada. One was in a Paris Metro station, that same year, and the other was in Hong Kong. To my way of thinking, an underground Parisian catacomb—some parts of which are millennia old—equals rats.

The Catacombs of Paris have an ancient and fascinatingly horrible history. Ever since the time of the Gauls and Romans, Paris has been quarried—limestone for buildings, sand for glass, green clay for bricks and tiles. Paris’s unusual compulsion to devour itself from below is how the Catacombs came to be.

Even in more recent history, miners still exploited the rock under the Latin Quarter to produce the finest building stone in Europe. Notre Dame, the Palais Royal, and most Parisian mansions were constructed from this limestone. The hundreds of years of mining left a foundation of modern Paris that was, until recently, not much more than a honeycombed bed. Almost 300 kilometres of tunnels made Paris streets dangerously prone to sinkholes.

In the eighteenth century a Paris city administrator, Charles Axel Guillaumot, realized that the city was in danger of collapse. Sinkholes swallowed entire buildings and street intersections. For years his crews reinforced underground tunnels, matching them to the streets above—matching even to the extent of street names and building numbers.

When Guillaumot’s consolidation of the tunnels was complete he turned his attention to the problem of Paris’s cemeteries. And this is where it gets gruesome.

Cemeteries were overflowing with the dead. It was so bad that body parts burst through retaining walls and found their way into Parisian cellars.

Guillaumot decided that his newly reinforced catacombs would solve the problem of the overfull cemeteries. Workers hauled human remains from Paris’s graveyards to the ossuary beneath the streets of Montparnasse. When it was complete, the population of the ossuary was ten times the population of the Paris above. The underground ossuary of Paris covers an area of three acres.

In the summer of 2008 my family rented a large house in the centre of Paris, very close to the Catacombs. It was a wonderful place to gather our friends and family and we found that on most nights we had eight to ten people seated around the courtyard dinner table. That summer I cooked and I explored. Explored everywhere, that is, except the Catacombs.

The last week of our visit I knew that I couldn’t put off any longer the visit to the Catacombs. All of our guests had gone there, the entrance being only three blocks from the house. Not one had admitted to seeing a single rat.

From our guests came stories of how, in WWII, the catacombs had housed the headquarters of the Paris Resistance. Amazingly, the Resistance fighters were only a few hundred yards away, through the labyrinth of tunnels, from a German underground bunker. Neither knew of the other’s nearby existence.

In 2008, it wasn’t a newfound bravery that caused to me visit this probable rat-lair. It was something much more compelling. Research. A drive to do research for a novel that was already simmering in my brain.

Finally, one day, with my husband and children, I visited the Catacombs. I wish I could say I did it without fear. But the truth is that, for most of the visit, my rat-radar was on high-alert and I was teetering on the edge of running in blind, adrenalin-fuelled panic. But no rats were to be seen.

Later, in a much calmer state I began forming the idea to a story which would become my now, almost complete, De Rigueur Mortis.

De Rigueur Mortis is a mystery thriller is set in 1954 Paris. American school teacher, Amelia Erickson, has come to Paris to uncover the truth about her brother—a brother long thought killed in WWII. Amelia poses as an au-pair and through her investigations finds that, hidden beneath the elegance of the haute couture houses, secrets fester.

British scientist, Nate Hall, is swept into this conspiracy and he, together with Amelia, must race to stop a former Nazi war criminal, who is intent on forcing the United States into another world war. A war against Britain.

De Rigueur Mortis is a story that couldn’t have come about had I not forced myself to swallow my fear and go down into the Catacombs of Paris.

For a riveting history of the catacombs I highly recommend reading Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb.

So tell me, readers of Meanderings and Muses, have you had to conquer a fear to accomplish something important? What fear was it?

I’d like to thank the fearless Kaye, for inviting me to be her guest.