Today, bringing royal fans the reprieve from thinking about Prince Andrew's spiral of scandals, is news that Queen Camilla has reportedly taken to assigning book-inspired "nicknames" to senior members of the Royal Household.
According to the Mirror, the Queen's adorably quirky new habit comes courtesy of her recent collaboration of sorts with one of her favorite authors, crime novelist Peter James, who included the King and Queen in his newest book, The Hawk Is Dead: A Killer In The Palace.
While King Charles is also featured in the book, the Mirror reports that Camilla is "said to play a key role" in the book, which sees James' popular detective character Roy Grace investigating a murder in Buckingham Palace.
James explained that the collaboration's origins—and his friendship with the now-Queen—trace back almost a decade.
“It was 2016 and I got an email one morning that said ‘whatever you’re doing, stop, and buy a copy of the Daily Mail,'" he explained, according to Cambridgeshire Live. "So I did and on page three was Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, in her office with two Roy Grace books."
Then-Duchess Camilla working in her office in 2016, with two Roy Grace detective novels visible on the bookshelves behind her.
“She said I was one of her two favorite authors—Jane Austen was her other," James continued. "I wrote to her and said ‘thank you so much’ and she wrote a really chatty letter back, saying ‘I love them, I’ve read every single one, when’s the next one coming out?’"
The author went on to explain that his friendship with Camilla blossomed from there, and he began sending her early copies of each new book he published.
"She’d always write a chatty letter back—she wrote one saying ‘I finished it on my endless journey to Australia, what on earth am I going to read on the journey home now?’” he shared.
James explained that, eventually, Camilla wrote in one of her letters asking, "When are you going to set Roy Grace in London?"
"I thought ‘hm, things don’t end well for people who disobey queens!'" he explained of the origin of the idea for a detective novel in a royal setting. "I thought if I’m going to send him to London, Buckingham Palace would be the ideal place.”
James went on to explain that he came up for the idea for the book and sent it to Camilla "via a senior member of the royal household." The Queen was in Kenya at the time, but James got word back just a week later that "she absolutely loved it and laughed her head off."
Camilla, chatting with author Peter James during her visit to the set of Grace, ITV's adaptation of James' Roy Grace series of novels, on November 4, 2021 in Brighton, England.
Still, James was doubtful that the book idea would be approved by the Palace bureaucracy.
"She said she had to give it to Buckingham Palace comms and I thought ‘that’s it, they won’t ever let it happen,'" he explained. “Two days later Buckingham Palace comms had approved it."
Now that the book is finished, "truth is imitating fiction behind palace walls," as Daily Mail royal columnist Richard Eden put in a recent piece.
"Peter James substitutes the names of Royal Household staff members in his new novel, The Hawk Is Dead, in which fictional detective Roy Grace and Queen Camilla search for a killer in Buckingham Palace," Eden explained, before sharing that James had revealed to him that Camilla has taken to using the character names from the book as nicknames for their real-life counterparts.
"I’ve heard Camilla is calling senior members of the Royal Household by the nicknames I’ve given them in the book," James told Eden. "She’s calling the master of the Royal Household [Vice Admiral Sir Tony Johnstone-Burt] ‘Tommy’ – in the book he’s 'General Tommy.'"
The friendship between Camilla and James makes sense, of course, given the Queen's passion for reading in general.
"Queen Camilla, a well-known book lover and reading champion through her charity The Queen's Reading Room, has always been one of the first people to receive each Grace novel and is excited to have a starring role, alongside King Charles, in Peter's latest thriller," James' publisher, Pan Macmillan, said in a statement about the new royal-themed novel (per the Mirror).