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© Fantastic Fiction
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I first started
writing for pleasure when I was at school in London during the Second World War. As part of a week designed to boost War
Savings – this one was called Wings for Victory Week - we were encouraged to
enter an essay competition. As the essay
had to have an air force theme, I wrote about a Royal Air Force squadron
scrambling during the Battle of Britain.
It was something I knew a bit about; I had watched the battle from my
back garden.
Those of us who
were commended for our effort, and there were many of us, were taken to the
local town hall to listen to a lecture by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, holder of
the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order & Bar, and the
Distinguished Flying Cross & Bar.
Gibson had just
returned from the famous raid that had resulted in the breaching of the Möhne
and Eder Dams in Germany,
and he held us spellbound with his account of the raid. To us schoolboys, Gibson was a giant of a
man, a famous hero. However, he was
slightly built and only 26 years of age!
This encounter gave
me the impetus to write, but my aspirations to become an author were
interrupted by five years in the British Army and 30 years in the London
Metropolitan Police. Being a Scotland
Yard detective did not leave very much spare time, particularly during the
espionage cases in which I was involved and the four years I spent at 10 Downing Street
as protection officer to the prime minister.
Nevertheless, I managed to start writing as a hobby.
When I left the
police, I found an agent and gave him a book I had written about a man who had
lived through both world wars. However,
my agent suggested that, as a former policeman, I should write a crime
novel. It took me three weeks to write
my first book, The Cold Light of Dawn.
Two weeks later the agent told me that it had been accepted by
Macmillan. For the next month, I
revelled in having become a published author, but then my agent asked me how my
next book was getting on. I hadn’t
started, but soon did. My second novel, Confirm
or Deny, was written in four weeks, and accepted by Macmillan before the
first one had appeared in print.
I’ve now had 37
novels published, all of them crime stories except for my one political
thriller, Division.
However,
the farther removed I became from my police service; the more difficult it was
to ensure accuracy. Police organisation
and methods are changing all the time, and parliament is bringing out new laws
on an almost daily basis. Consequently,
I often found that what I’d written was technically out of date by the time it
was published.
Nine years ago, I
came up with an idea to overcome this problem: I created the historical
character of Divisional Detective Inspector Ernest Hardcastle of the A or
Whitehall Division of the London Metropolitan Police. The great advantage in writing such a crime
novel is that neither the procedure nor the law changes by the time it’s
published.
Hardcastle’s first
outing was in Hardcastle’s Spy, set in 1916. The reaction of my readers
was very encouraging. They liked
Hardcastle and they liked novels set in the Great War, and they wanted more of
the same. This presented me with
something of a dilemma. Bernard
Cornwell, the brilliant creator of Sharp, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, had some
23 years to cover the action of his novels; I had only 51 months. Had I known, I would have set my first book
in 1914. But by the time I discovered
what the readers liked, I had already written the second book in the series: Hardcastle’s
Armistice set, obviously, in 1918.
This meant that if
I were to remain within the time frame of the 1914-18 War, I would have to break
the chronological sequence. So, the
action of the next book, Hardcastle’s Airmen, took place in February
1915, and was followed by Hardcastle’s Actress, which opens on Christmas
Day 1914. The eleventh in the series, Hardcastle’s
Traitors, begins on New Year’s Eve 1915, and was published last month.
Fortunately, I had
the foresight to give Hardcastle a son, Walter, who was born in 1900. If I run out of time, I can start on Young
Hardcastle, who in 1939 would have been just the right age for him to be a
divisional detective inspector doing the same job as his father had done, but
in the Second World War.
There are
linguistic problems in writing historical fiction, given that English is an
evolving
language. Some of the jargon
and the slang that is commonplace today was not necessarily so in 1914. I have about twenty dictionaries of varying
kinds, the most important of which, in this context, are my two dictionaries of
slang. These publications are of immense
value in determining whether a particular word or phrase was current during the
period about which I am writing. For
example, who would know these days the meaning of a ‘fourpenny cannon’? But in Hardcastle’s day, it was a steak and
kidney pie. And a ‘Piccadilly window’
was a term describing a monocle.
I also have a copy
of The Handbook of English Costume in the Twentieth Century; an
invaluable guide to what was worn – and not worn – during the Great War.
Bearing in mind
that I am writing for an American readership as well as an English one, I’ve
had to include in each of the Hardcastle stories a glossary of less familiar
terms, as well as military terminology.
This was originally placed at the end of the book until an Australian
reader, emailing me from Alice Springs,
complained that he’d only discovered the glossary after he’d finished
reading the book. Later publications now
place it immediately after the title page.
When I started my
police career, I was posted to Cannon Row police station where Hardcastle has
his office. I was fortunate, as far as
the Metropolitan Police was concerned, that little had changed since the Great
War, and I was able easily to recall the layout of that police station. In addition, much of the law that, as a
patrolling constable, I helped to enforce, hadn’t changed for years, and was
extant in Hardcastle’s time.
I also remember
walking a nighttime beat in London’s Whitehall. At two o’clock in the morning, there was
hardly any traffic. In fact, there was
just an eerie silence broken only by the popping of the street gas lamps. Apart from the Cenotaph, that made its
appearance first as a wooden structure in 1919, little had changed since the
days of the Great War. And when I met
another policeman, wearing a similar cape to the one I was wearing, it was easy
to imagine that I had travelled back in time.
A great deal of the
action of the Hardcastle novels involves the armed forces, and as a former
soldier, I’m familiar with their organisation and regulations.
What’s more, I’ve
always had a consuming interest in the Great War, and have visited the battlefields
and cemeteries of Flanders many times. As a result, I was able to place some of the
action in that area. In Hardcastle’s
Spy, I had my hero travel to the little town of Poperinge
in Belgium, seven miles from
Ypres, and home to the original Toc H.
In order to provide
the reader with period detail, I’ve made a point of including significant
events that took place during the Great War.
The mining of the Messines Ridge in Belgium,
the loss of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener at sea in HMS Hampshire, the disastrous
Battle of the Somme, and the Zeppelin and Gotha air raids on London
have all been used as a backcloth to Hardcastle’s adventures.
Probably
the greatest compliment I’ve received about Hardcastle came from an American
reviewer who described him as being ‘as
curmudgeonly as Inspector Morse, as intelligent as Sherlock Holmes, and as wily
as Hercule Poirot’.
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Hardcastle's Traitors -
A murder in a jeweller's shop proves to be more than meets the eye in Detective Inspector Hardcastle's latest investigation
It is New Year's Eve 1915 and the Hardcastle family are welcoming 1916 at their home in Kennington, London. But an hour into the New Year, Hardcastle is called to a murder in a jeweller's shop in Vauxhall. In a first for the A Division senior detective, the killers apparently made their escape in a motor car.
As Hardcastle's enquiry progresses, what he believed to be a fairly straightforward investigation turns into one with ramifications extending from Chelsea via Sussex and Surrey to France, close to the fighting on the Western Front. And as is so often the case in wartime, the army becomes involved and so, to Hardcastle's dismay, does Scotland Yard's Special Branch . . .
Hardcastle’s Traitors by Graham Ison is available now in the UK from Severn House Publishers, and will be
available in the USA
as of 1st November 2013.
Graham Ison’s website is at www.grahamison.co.uk
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