Three nights that almost destroyed a city By Nigel Proctor

When it comes to the Blitz most people think of London, Liverpool, Coventry, hardly ever Birmingham. Yet Birmingham was the third most bombed city in the UK and in November 1940, three consecutive nights of bombing came close to destroying the place.

By the end of those three nights, three fifths of Birmingham had no water mains – even the canals were low – and there was governmental concern that another night’s raid could raze this city of tightly packed workshops and wood framed buildings to the ground.

Water tankers from across the country were sent to Birmingham but for whatever reason, no bombs fell again until early-December 1940, by which time Brum was better prepared – albeit marginally.

Amidst all this chaos and confusion crime was rife. Bomb sites were looted, juvenile delinquency rampant, sexual harassment during blackout common and fatalities due to road traffic accidents rose. There is also some suggestion that the murder rate peaked, as bodies found in bomb-damaged buildings were assumed to be war victims and were buried without postmortem. Postmortems did happen but were reserved for the few cases when circumstances were obviously suspicious.

Black marketeering was rife too with, for instance, untaxed Irish tobacco and whiskey smuggled in from the Republic, flooding Birmingham – Brum has had a large Irish population for a long time.

But as well as its Irish, Scottish and Welsh citizens, wartime Birmingham had a vibrant European community of Italians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, Croatians, French, Greek Cypriots and many more. Obvious enemy aliens, such as Germans, had been interned but Italians who’d been in the UK over twenty years were allowed to carry on as normal, or as normal as wartime would permit.

Moving in and amongst all of this, from Birmingham to West Bromwich and back again, was my family and my two very different grandfathers.

My Mom’s dad, a straight-up Methodist, was a furnace worker by day, a volunteer fireman by night. Mom (born in  1937) claimed that she was being pushed home one night after a raid, only for her mom – my nan – to point at a burning warehouse. The fire brigade on-site, there was a man astride the end of the long ladders, dumping water into the inferno.

“That’s your dad,” my nan said to my mom. 

Mom always swore this was her earliest memory of her father.

Garg – that’s what I called my maternal grandad – never talked about his war but he did on occasion talk about petty crime and black marketeering and once how one man, who was clearly a “wrong ‘un”, disappeared during night shift, never to be seen again. Rumour was, he’d been thrown into one of the molten metal pools, evaporating instantly.

My other grandfather was a different sort: a hard-drinking house painter and communist. He believed the war was a necessary evil which would wear out the imperialist forces of Britain and Germany. And once both nations were down and out, the Soviet Union could role across Europe, creating in its wake a Marxist utopia. 

There was also a suspected murderer in my family.

A young girl was found dead under a door in the garden of a bombed out house and a cousin of my dad arrested. This lad was described as “simple” – whatever that may mean today. 

Eventually, he was released without charge after the pathologist was unable to determine whether the girl’s death by suffocation was murder or an unfortunate accident.

I was told this story by my Auntie Vi, when I was about four. She was my dad’s elder brother’s wife and a lively woman, who took a wicked pleasure from scaring little children – especially me.

I adored her.

During lockdown, when I decided to write Fire Damage, this old story came back to me and I asked Dad if he could remember any more details about the incident. Ninety at the time, he said it rang a vague bell but no more. Mom said it definitely happened but she wasn’t sure when or where, as it had taken place before she knew the Proctors – but Vi had married George in 1941, so it could have been around then. 

Possibly.

She knew no more than I did.

However, this was good enough for me: a starting point without too many pesky, constraining facts.

So now I had my inciting incident, a location and time and the complex diversity and broad criminality of wartime Birmingham to draw on.

All that was missing was my lead detective but that’s another story.

Fire Damage by Nigel Proctor (Floodgate Press) Out Now

The Birmingham Blitz, November 1940. War kills, crime pays, no more so than when the lights are off and everyone’s looking out for themselves – or looking the other way. After a young girl is found dead, Detective Sergeant Harry Marsh and his new partner, Policewoman Annie Scott, uncover a world of illegal immigrants, arms theft, domestic terrorism and police corruption – all against a backdrop of burnt-out houses and burnt-out lives. In a world at war, only one thing is certain: life is the cheapest commodity of all.

Nigel Proctor can be found on Instagram @nigelproc

Claire Gradidge on the Inspiration for Treachery at Hursley Park House

 

Inspiration strikes at strange times – and in strange ways. For Treachery at Hursley Park House, the second novel in my WWII series of crime novels set in and around the small market town of Romsey, it came as a vivid image of the opening scene. A party is being held in a stately home on the longest night of the year. Music, laughter, voices drift out into the frosty park where a young man lies drowned, a fragment of paper clutched in his hand. 

I’ve always loved the austere glamour of a winter landscape. Though I had no idea where the image had sprung from, I had already decided on a winter setting for the book – specifically 1942/3, when the tide of war was beginning to turn in Britain’s favour. A further influence may have been my fascination with the idea of the outsider – in this book, it’s not only the dead boy who is left out in the cold. 

I knew I needed to find a setting for the story that would take my readers further afield than Romsey. While my first novel, The Unexpected Return of Josephine Fox, (published as a result of winning the 2019 Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller) had been set almost entirely in the town where I was born and brought up, for the second novel, I wanted to stretch my characters’ wings – and their roles. But the rest, at this stage, was still a mystery. What had happened, and how would my investigators, Jo (Josephine) Fox and coroner Bram Nash get involved?

Then came the part of writing that seduces me every time – researching the history, locality and real-life accounts I needed to provide the background for my story. 

Hursley Park House – approximately six miles from Romsey – had been requisitioned late in 1940 by the Ministry of Aircraft Production following the air raids of September that year which had effectively destroyed the Woolston and Itchen works in Southampton where the Spitfire was designed and manufactured. Production of the aircraft was moved into innumerable small factories and works throughout the region, while the design and management team of Supermarine were relocated to Hursley. This real-life history provided me with the perfect location for my opening scene: a Victorian sunken garden with a central pool. 

In my story, Jo is recruited to work undercover, investigating the leak of secrets from Hursley Park. Meanwhile, Bram becomes involved in finding out more about the young man’s death: not an accidental drowning as originally ruled, but a murder. Though their investigations begin separately, they soon interconnect, each discovering vital elements of the evidence they need to identify and track down the traitor – and killer.

A play, Howard Brenton’s The Shadow Factory – and a Heritage Open Day at Hursley Park House (now the HQ of IBM) played an important part in the development of the story, giving me fresh insights into the history of Supermarine’s occupation of Hursley House. I was lucky that both came before the first Covid lockdown was imposed – while the ‘Stay at home’ message was good for my writing output, it did put a hitch in some of the research. Like the protagonists of my story, I had to ask myself ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ Instead of travelling, I was able to find out about patterns of habitation and trace the byways that connected the various village settings of the story by studying old maps (courtesy of the National Library of Scotland), an unexpected pleasure for someone with relatively little sense of direction! 

My first book had been written as part of a PhD thesis, and I’d had the luxury of a relaxed academic deadline in which to write – and rewrite – the novel. Winning the Richard & Judy prize – and getting the book ready for commercial publication – introduced me to the keener pressures of real-life publishing deadlines. I was hugely supported by my agent Rowan Lawton and then editor Katherine Armstrong in what felt like a whirlwind of edits and page proofs. It turned out to be good practice for what lay ahead. While I had always planned The Unexpected Return to be the first of a series, it wasn’t until June 2020 that my publisher, Bonnier, confirmed they wanted a further two books featuring Bram and Jo. With a deadline for the ms of Treachery at Hursley Park House set for the end of 2020, it was as well my inciting image – that drowned boy in a winter garden – proved such a strong foundation to build on.

I’m currently working on the third novel in the series, set around D Day. In this, the action of the book is once again focused on Romsey. Jo will have some huge challenges, both personal and professional, to overcome if she is to bring a killer to justice once more. 

Treachery at Hursley Park House by Claire Gradidge (Bonnier Zaffre) Out Now DECEMBER 1942. As the war rages on, the accidental death of a young man is almost unremarkable. Except this young man was patrolling the grounds of Hursley Park House, where teams are designing crucial modifications to the Spitfire - and he was found clutching part of a blueprint. JANUARY 1943. Josephine Fox is given a code name and a mission as she is seconded to Hursley: uncover the network responsible for information leaks to the enemy. And when the dead man's father visits Bram Nash convinced that his son was innocent of espionage and the victim of murder, her friend is also drawn into the investigation. But as Jo and Bram circle closer to the truth, danger is closing in around them...

Michael Russell on History as Mystery

Someone once said that by the time any novel is published, it’s already ‘historical’. A weary complaint about how slowly publishing wheels grind, but the historical novel is a much-loved genre, and recent years have seen a remarkable growth in historical crime fiction. I’m now writing a seventh story about an Irish detective, Stefan Gillespie, set in the 1930s and 40s. The books take a sideways, sometimes wry look at World War Two from the perspective of Ireland, which remained controversially neutral, while providing British forces with tens of thousands of volunteers and secretly working surprisingly closely with British Intelligence. 

The reasons for Irish neutrality, some inevitable, some understandable, some less so, form a web of contradictions in a country scarred by civil strife and, in the early years of the war, facing invasion by Germany or Britain, possibly both at once! 

Such contradictions, as well as the fog of war Stefan Gillespie encounters not only in Ireland, but in Britain, America, Spain, and Germany too, are part of why finding new things to write about a war that has produced more fiction than any other is possible. But real storytelling is not in the sweeping panorama of history. My novels do involve espionage at times, and they do engage with what war means, in ways both trivial and tragic, but it is in the ordinary business of ordinary lives, and yes, ‘ordinary’ murders, that true stories are told. Stories of individuals in extraordinary circumstances, and often in circumstances not so extraordinary. 

But why history as mystery at all? As writers it’s a way to write uniquely about what obsesses us and fascinates us. The link to the past is deep, and fiction gives freedom to explore it in quirky, unexpected ways. That doesn’t mean leaving facts behind, just looking at them differently. There are alternative histories (Robert Harris’s still wonderful ‘Fatherland’), but historical crime readers expect historical history! They are well informed and leap on any mistake. To persuade them to enter your world and inhabit it, you can only invent on firm foundations of fact. 

The things I invent are often pedestrian. The most unlikely events are almost always real, often small things historians have no interest in. When Stefan Gillespie stays at the Irish College in Salamanca, at the close of the Spanish Civil War, only the seminary’s archives provided the coincidence that it was the HQ for German Military Intelligence. Such serendipity is probably the experience of every historical fiction writer. When I needed a police raid on an upmarket abortion clinic in Dublin in 1935, I had no idea such a clinic existed. Not only did it, but the Austrian who ran it was a German spy. Almost too much coincidence for fiction!

But the appeal of historical mystery isn’t a particular time or particular facts. It’s our intimacy with the past that matters. In Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film ‘A Canterbury Tale’, on the eve of D-Day, Thomas Culpepper gives a lecture to some soldiers, about the Pilgrim’s Way and the Kent village they’re camped near. The soldiers are waiting for the pub to open. They ask why they should care what happened six hundred years ago. Culpepper’s reply isn’t about great events or figures, but the houses we lived in as children and how our grandparents lived.

‘There are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors… follow the old road and as you walk, think of them. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill like you today, they sweated and paused for breath, like you. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and heather, you’re only seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same streams. The same birds sing. When you lie on your back, and watch the clouds sailing, you’re so close to those people you can hear the thrumming of the horses’ hoofs, the sound of wheels on the road, and their laughter and talk. And when I turn the bend in the road, where they saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I’ve only to turn my head to see them behind me.’ 

The ‘old road’ is any road, anywhere. Mine stretches through the Wicklow Hills to the uplands of Dorset, along the Thames into London, across the plains of East Africa and the foothills of Kilimanjaro, through Corfu’s woods to Homer’s wine-dark sea. We’re on a road not less but more travelled-by. Our lives are richer for it. 

But Thomas Culpepper missed something. He didn’t hear a faint gasp, or the cry from the trees as a knife slipped between a pilgrim’s ribs. Historical crime fiction is your opportunity to travel back in time and remedy some murderous omissions... 

The City Under Siege  by Michael Russell (LittleBrown) Out Now

1941, and Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie is ferrying documents between Dublin and war-torn London. When Ireland's greatest actor is arrested in Soho, after the brutal murder of a gay man, Stefan extricates him from an embarrassing situation. But suddenly he is looking at a series of murders, stretching across Britain and Ireland. The deaths were never investigated deeply as they were not considered a priority. And there are reasons to look away now. It's not only that the killer may be a British soldier, Scotland Yard is also hiding the truth about the victim. But an identical murder in Malta makes investigation essential. Malta, at the heart of the Mediterranean war, is under siege by German and Italian bombers. Rumours that a British soldier murdered a Maltese teenager can't go unchallenged without damaging loyalty to Britain. Now Britain will cooperate with Ireland to find the killer and Stefan is sent to Malta. The British believe the killer is an Irishman; that's the result they want. And they'd like Stefan to give it to them. But in the dark streets of Valletta there are threats deadlier than German bombs...

Photograph ©Hachette

In The Spotlight - Carolyn Kirby

 

Name :- Carolyn Kirby

Job :- Author

Website :- https://www.carolynkirby.com

Twitter :- @novelcarolyn

Introduction

Carolyn Kirby is the author of two novels. The Conviction of Cora Burns was longlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Debut Crown Award and shortlisted for the Specsavers Debut Crime Fiction Award. Her second book When We Fall, was published in May 2020 and was chosen by The Times as one of the best novels of 2020.

Current book?

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison. It’s a Western told in the striking vernacular of teenage narrator Jessilyn/Jesse. Full of quirky observation (“Your eye pulls the trigger,” “a body is little more than a horse you don’t need to stable”) but driven by a heart-stopping, action-filled plot. Genius.

Favourite book

Oh dear, that’s quite an ask! Forced to choose one title, I will just mention Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller, a book that should be much better known. It’s a study of PTSD in a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars but it is also the story of a thrilling chase through the length of a vividly realised Regency Britain, as well as a heart-breaking love story. Just read it!

Which two characters would you invite to dinner and why? 

First off is Julian from The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, a character who commands your attention with his hair-raisingly hilarious bad behaviour and intoxicating charm. Perhaps a match for him, in more ways than one, would be the super-cool and fearless Martha from the excellent Cold War thriller The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt by Sarah Armstrong.

How do you relax?

I find writing pretty relaxing to be honest. When your mind is immersed in the imaginary world you are building, it becomes switched off from daily life. But even more absorbing, though I wish I was better at it, is codeword.

What book do you wish you had written and why? 

Nutshell by Ian McEwan. This is such a wacky concept; a whodunnit told by a foetus, yet it works brilliantly. And in a sign of an author at the top of their game, it is laugh-out-loud funny. I am trying to make my own writing funnier and I can tell you that is certainly harder to make readers laugh than it is to make them cry.

What would you say to your younger self if you were just starting out as a writer?

Don’t do it! Or rather, don’t do it yet. I’m glad I didn’t start writing until I was in my mid-forties as I wouldn’t have had enough patience or a tough enough skin to become a novelist as a young person. Writing novels is a solitary way of working too, which might have sent me a bit crazy in my twenties, but now, in my fifties, I love it.

Why do you prefer to write standalone novels as opposed to a series and would you consider writing a series?

I will always write standalones as I need to get excited about a new story by setting it in a world that is entirely new to me and then embarking on a journey of discovery. Much as I love being in each of the settings I have visited (Victorian Birmingham, WW2 Britain and Poland, and more recently the north of England and Scotland in the 18th century) I can’t imagine ever going back to any of them. There are too many other times and places to explore!

Your 2 favourite Oxford books?

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears is a brilliant crime novel disguised as a panorama of 17th century thought, politics and religion. It is set in Oxford during the Restoration, a time when the battle between science and superstition for the intellectual upper hand was at its fiercest. 

After Such Kindness by Gaynor Arnold also looks at the influence of religion on society but her re-working of the story of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell in 19th century Oxford has a spell-binding focus on the family as a crucible for the doubts and demons of the age.

I shall be saying more about both of these great novels in my talk for the St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Weekend 13th-15th August 2021. Can’t wait!

When We Fall by Carolyn Kirby (Oldcastle Books Ltd)

In England, 1943, British pilot Vee Katchatourian is determined to get her flying Wings, in spite of her sex and foreign name. Meanwhile, in Occupied Poland, Ewa Hartman serves German officers in her father's guest house, while secretly gathering intelligence for the resistance. What neither woman knows is that they are in love with the same man... Stefan Bergel is haunted by a choice he made whilst held in Russian captivity. Now, he's one of the only surviving witnesses of an appalling war crime - a crime that risks going unpunished. Compelled to expose the truth, Stefan asks both women to take enormous risks for him. Their actions could completely change the course of the war... but is he asking too much?

Information about 2021 St Hilda's College Crime Fiction Weekend and how to book tckets can be found here.

When history taps you on the shoulder by Chris Lloyd

There was a moment when I was researching for The Unwanted Dead that stopped me in my tracks.

For me, one of the most important parts of research is walking the streets where my characters walk. I need to experience all the sights, sounds and smells that they do, the light at certain times of day, the sense of place that they take for granted and that I can’t. And even though the book is set in Paris in 1940, the city stays the same, a witness to its own past, and the streets and squares all resonate with that history. So I’d spent days losing myself in its heart. I’d wandered around the Fifth Arrondissement, where my protagonist, Eddie Giral, lives and I found his street and his apartment block. I’d walked to and from Thirty-Six, the police station where he works. I’d looked into the windows he’d have looked out of. I’d tracked down all the hotels and buildings that had been requisitioned by the Germans and where Eddie might have been summoned. I’d found the now-gentrified parts of town that would have been the unloved and ragged refuge of villains and rascals in Eddie’s day. I’d even had an unexpected moment of calm in the apiary in the Jardin du Luxembourg, which ended up as the setting to a few key scenes in the book. 

And throughout all this time, I’d come across unassuming plaques on nondescript walls, marking the place where a Resistance fighter fell or where a gun battle took place during the battle to liberate the city. I came across the building where poet Robert Desnos was living when he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 – he survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Flossenburg only to die of typhoid in Theresienstadt a month after the camp was liberated. Bullet holes still mark the stone around the windows and doors to ordinary homes and office blocks. Metro stations and squares are named after exceptionally brave but ordinary people murdered under the Occupation. And each one left their mark on me.

But there was one moment that truly stopped me. A small grey plaque that affected me more than any other. It was in the Pletzel, the old Jewish quarter, on the Right Bank. You walk through narrow streets before coming to a bustling road, still fairly narrow but wider than any of the others in the neighbourhood. Along the way, you’ve gone past kosher bakers and halal butchers, patisseries and delis, restaurants and takeaways. Until you come to a school. A primary school. Almost hidden inside the unobtrusive entrance, a gateway like an old mews, is the plaque. High up on the wall outside the porter’s room, it’s easy to miss. It lists the names of the children from the school who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and who never returned. They were all aged six, seven, eight years old. And the list of names is long. I stood and stared, rooted to the spot, as shoppers and workers hurried around me. Like a freeze-frame in a movie. It was some minutes before I could bring myself to stop reading and rereading the names and move on. I didn’t take a photo, it wouldn’t have been right.

I write stories set in this city at this time. Their prime purpose is to entertain. My character, Eddie, is irreverent and cynical, mouthy and damaged. He fights the evil he finds in his work with flippant words and a dogged tenacity. His moral compass is not always how he might have wanted it to be as a young man going away to the First World War. He gets things wrong and does wrong things. Yet underneath the grim wisecracks and mocking iconoclasm is a sense of responsibility. Towards the victims and towards the vulnerable. 

And that, I think, is what I took away from my walks around the city and on the day I saw the plaque in the primary school. The job of historical fiction, be it crime or any other genre, is to entertain, but there’s another purpose, and it took history to tap me on the shoulder to bring that home to me. There’s a responsibility in writing historical fiction. In whatever story, set in whatever period, there has to be an underlying truth and honesty. It goes beyond ensuring your tale is historically accurate and your research is as painstaking as you can make it. There’s a responsibility in using fiction to give a voice to people who lost theirs long ago. To enabling a sense of justice for the victims and the vulnerable. And that, in my case, is where Eddie comes in.

The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd (Orion Publishing) Out 17 September 2020

Paris, Friday 14th June 1940. The day the Nazis march into Paris. It made headlines around the globe. Paris police detective Eddie Giral - a survivor of the last World War - watches helplessly on as his world changes forever. But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim. To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was. All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home.

Mark Ellis on Coronavirus Britain v Wartime Britain

In recent weeks I’ve seen several media comments seeking to contrast our current Coronavirus troubles with those endured on the Home Front in World War 2. These have been mainly prompted by the rapid escalation of Coronavirus deaths, with the reported number now exceeding that of UK civilians killed during the Blitz in 1940/41. The two crises are of course very different but I thought it might be useful to set out some facts and figures to enable informed comparison.

As of the date of writing, there have been nearly 35,000 UK virus deaths according to the public health authorities. 32,000 deaths were caused by bombing in the Blitz and there were 87,000 casualties. The total number of war-related civilian deaths was 67,000.

The London Blitz lasted for eleven weeks and the city was bombed every night bar one. Other cities and towns were also subjected to heavy bombing. These included Swansea, Cardiff, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth, Birmingham, Coventry and Liverpool. While the 1940/41 Blitz represented the worst phase of the Luftwaffe bombing of Britain, sporadic air attacks continued throughout the war. In 1944 London again came under heavy bombardment, this time from German V1 (and later V2) missiles, or as they were better known, ‘Doodlebugs’. These killed over 6,000 people and caused more than 18,000 casualties.

In addition to civilian casualties, over 384,000 members of the armed forces lost their lives in the war.

The wartime population had some deprivations which we in lockdown don’t have and vice versa.

Wartime food options were very limited. Many basic products, such as sugar, meats, fats, bacon, and cheese were rationed. A number of other products, though not rationed, were hard to find. Tropical fruits such as bananas, oranges and lemons were like gold dust. By contrast during the current crisis, apart from the hoarding panics seen in the early days, most food and other domestic products have been in plentiful supply. There is one point of food shopping we have in common, though – the requirement to form long queues.

Apart from a few weeks at the outset of the war, cinemas, theatres, dancehalls and other places of entertainment were open for the duration. We appear to have a while yet to wait for them to be open to us. It should, however, be remembered that the wartime population had few forms of home family  entertainment. The radio, playing cards and reading were pretty much the extent. People from then would be astonished at our world of Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Wartime pubs and restaurants were open. Restaurant fare, except occasionally if you were very rich, was limited, but if you wanted a change of scene from home, you could get it. We cannot, and it seems we have some weeks to wait before we can.

In the war, as now, major sporting events were put on hold. However, ordinary sport carried on during the war years. Professional league football was suspended between 1939 and 1945 but where possible, other non-professional competition continued. Inter-service football matches were popular and drew large crowds.  Rugby and cricket continued on a similar basis. There were no limitations on the sporting activities ordinary people could engage in, other than where facilities had been put to alternative wartime use. Most golf clubs stayed open. Some new rules were introduced to accommodate the war. For example Richmond Golf Club introduced a rule that ‘in competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play’.

Parks have been a godsend to many of us during the lockdown. In WW2 most remained open, but some areas of parkland were unavailable as they were taken over for military use. In London there were gun batteries in Hyde Park and Holland Park. Other park space was used for allotments and air raid shelters.

Petrol was rationed and many people mothballed their cars for the duration of the war. Traffic on the roads declined substantially then, as it has during lockdown. Shortages of petrol have not, however, been the problem for us.

The war had a terrible impact on the economy. It took a long time for Britain to recover and the last repayment of US and Canadian war debts was only made by the British Government in 2006. The economic impact of the virus is clearly going to be substantial, although one hopes much more short-lived.

So there are points of similarity and points of difference between then and now. The biggest overall difference, however, is that the crisis faced by the British people in the war was an existential one. Defeat would have meant the loss of liberty and the British way of life. Tragic as the impact of the pandemic has been for many, it has not placed the existence of the country in peril.  

A Death in Mayfair by Mark Ellis (Published by Headline)

December 1941.  On a bright Sunday morning in Hawaii, Japanese planes swoop down and attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbour. America enters the war and Britain no longer stands alone against Hitler.  Conditions on the home front remain bleak. In a city pulverised by the Blitz, with rampant crime and corruption and overstretched police resources, life for Scotland Yard detective Frank Merlin continues as arduous as ever.  In the week of Japan's aggression, the shattered body of beautiful film star Laura Curzon is found on the pavement beneath her Mayfair apartment, an apparent suicide. A mile away, the body of a strangled young girl is discovered in the rubble of a bombed-out building.   Merlin and his team investigate, encountering fraudulent film moguls, philandering movie stars, depraved Satanists and brutal gangsters as they battle through a wintry London in pursuit of the truth.

More information about Mark Ellis can be found on his website.   He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter @MarkEllis15

Peter Quinn on The Thrill of the Trilogy

Peter Quinn is the author of Hour of the Cat and The Man Who Never Returned the first two books in the Fintan Dunne trilogy.  He has participated as a guest commentator in several PBS documentaries, including the Academy Award-nominated film, “The Passion of Sister Rose”.  He was an advisor on Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York”. 

My introduction to the triune came early.  Each morning as my classmates and I made the sign of the cross, my first-grade nun stressed that the Trinity--one God in three separate and distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost--was essential to our faith and, ergo, to our salvation.  Since my six-year-old brain couldn’t make much sense of it, I was happy to be told the three-person God was a mystery beyond human understanding and had almost driven mad the theologians who’d tried to solve it.

Still, it stuck.  Three in one, one in three. The holy trifecta. In the large stained glass window on the south wall of our Bronx parish church, St. Patrick held up a shamrock.  One stem, three petals: They glowed a single emerald green as the sun lofted behind them.  For that moment at least, the riddle of the Trinity ceased to bewilder.

Over the years, as I wandered amid the thickets of secularity, I learned that, as well as a marker of religious dogma, three brought to whatever it was associated with a special aura, whether exciting (Triple Crown), silly (Three Stooges), erotic (ménage à trois), scary (Third Reich), exceptional (triple play), or sad (strike three).  Just by being three, ordinary things gained a special cachet.

When I set out to become a writer of books, I imagined one would suffice.  A historian manqué, just shy of a Ph.D., I first stumbled into speech writing.  I decided to try it for a year, save enough to go back to school, finish the dissertation, and turn it into a book.  “The best-laid schemes o' mice and men”, 
as Scottish poet Robert Burns put it “gang aft agley”.  I ended up scribbling for two New York governors and five chairmen of Time Inc./Time Warner across a span of three decades.

On the plus side, my job involved indoor work and required no manual labour.  It paid the mortgage and tuitions, and included a defined benefit plan; on the minus, it was frequently stressful, sometimes grinding, and always anonymous.  Occasionally a speechwriter or two has slipped from behind the curtain and gained fame crafting words for mouths other than his/her own.  But as I saw it, once you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding, and whatever praise or blame ensues is the sovereign’s alone.

As time went on, I felt a growing need to put my name on words I could publicly claim as mine.  I got to my office two hours early in order to attempt a novel.  Having grown used to churning out large chunks of copy in short amounts of time, I calculated I’d have a finished manuscript in a year or two.  Robert Burns proved right again.  Ten years later, I left the delivery room cradling my long-gestating mind child, Banished Children of Eve, a six-hundred-page saga of Civil War New York.

The first agent I submitted it to was dismissive.  I hadn’t written one novel, she wrote, but

“sausaged three in one”.  I was stung.  Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized its truth.  My novel was the story of Irish famine immigrants, the frightening, fecund mongrel world of mid-19th-century New York, and the impact of the Civil War.  These were the three petals.  Minstrel-songster Stephen Foster was stem and sausage skin.  His music is the book’s leitmotiv.  There are worse things to be accused of, I decided, than being a Trinitarian.  I stuck with three in one, and that’s how it was published.

I drew a great deal of satisfaction from at last having my name on writing all my own, so much so that I decided one wasn’t enough.  I had other stories I wanted to write.  Faced by commercial constraints as well as those of my own mortality, I knew the next had to be shorter.  Unfortunately, hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the hang of the short form, which required the precision of the pointillist.  I preferred the Jackson Pollack School, buckets of paint splashed across expansive canvases.

With the second novel, I decided to reverse the first: In place of three packed in one, one would be divided in three.  The stem I started with was Fintan Dunne, Irish-American ex-cop and private eye, a veteran of World Wars I and II, whose formal education ended in the Catholic Protectory, an orphanage cum reformatory in the Bronx.  In hardboiled style, Fin is a man who, if he ever had any illusions about human nature, had them kicked out of him so long ago he can’t remember what they were.

Fin is what the writer William Kennedy calls a “cynical humanist”.  Distrustful of all authority, sceptical of most causes, uninterested in heroics, he is reluctant to get involved.  Whatever the case, he knows from the outset that there are no perfect endings, no spotless souls, and that some mysteries are better left unsolved.  Still, despite his understanding of the futility of good intentions and the hopeless fallibility of everyone--including himself--Fin can’t help but try to see that some modicum of justice is done.  

I followed Fin as he fought with eugenicists and fifth columnists (Hour of the Cat), wrestled with the still-unsolved case of New York’s most-famous missing jurist (The Man Who Never Returned), and burrowed into the Cold War’s intricate machinations and betrayals (Dry Bones).  I’ve seen the city and the world through his eyes as he experienced two world wars, the Great Depression and the gloom-and-boom of the Eisenhower era, the rollercoaster years W.H. Auden accurately labelled “The Age of Anxiety”.

I’m grateful for our three-legged journey.  Fintan has been great company every step of the way.  Now that we finished our last caper and said our goodbyes, I’m hopeful that I’ve told his story the way he wanted it told, and that the three tales together--separate and distinct yet parts of the same whole--capture him in a jaded emerald glow.

You can find out more information about Peter Quinn and his work on his website and on his blog. You can also find him on Facebook.

Dry Bones is out now (£16.99, Duckworth)