Leonora Nattrass on the Inspiration for Scarlet Town

I am lucky enough to live in a seventeenth-century farmhouse five miles from Helston in West Cornwall. Helston is a beautiful town, if presently fallen on rather hard times like many a high street up and down the land. The buildings on its four main streets are mostly listed, which means that their old architecture is still authentic, if a little shabby, and the church is set on a hill above the town amid shady old streets of immense charm and character.

When I wrote Black Drop, the first in my Laurence Jago series of historical crime mysteries set in the 1790s, it seemed natural to me to make my main character, Laurence, a farmer’s son from my adopted county of Cornwall.

Searching for a name for my main character, I idly looked back through parish records about our own house and its inhabitants, and came across a Marie, a Laurence and a Grace living here in the 1640s. Laurence duly acquired a home in the shape of our own house, a mother named Marie and a sister named Grace. And it was perhaps from these suggestive names that the idea of their being half-French first occurred to me – an idea which seemed plausible enough, given the profitable smuggling trade between Cornwall and France in the eighteenth-century.

This was an idea full of possibilities in the context of the French Revolution raging across the channel, and Laurence working for the British government newly at war with the French republic.

In Black Drop, Laurence lives amid the dust and squalor of eighteenth-century London, working as a clerk to the Foreign Office, but always pining for the peace and beauty of the Cornish countryside. In the sequel, Blue Water, he is even further away from home, aboard a Post Office mail ship bound for Philadelphia. But even here, Cornwall looms large, for Falmouth’s packet ships, manned by Cornish crews, were the means by which news and correspondence spread around the globe. 

Nevertheless, I always wanted to bring Laurence home to Cornwall, and when I discovered the story of the 1790 election in Helston (in the wonderful resource ParliamentaryHistory Online, an ongoing project funded by the Houses of Parliament) I realised it would be a perfect vehicle for Laurence’s third adventure in Scarlet Town.

The true story was preposterous – a real case of truth being stranger than fiction, which is always very satisfactory to a historical crime writer! In the Helston election of 1790, a single octogenarian voter in the town sent two MPs to Westminster. He was the last of six old freemen, whom Parliament had decreed would have the honour of returning the town’s MPs until they all died.

This old voter was firmly in the pocket of the town’s patron, the Duke of Leeds, who told him who to vote for. Riled by this seigneurial arrangement, and rightly thinking the whole situation absurd, the mayor and corporation of the town set up a rival electorate of about thirty men, and, when the general election was called, the town duly split into fierce warring supporters of each side.

Even better from my point of view was the discovery that the mayor and corporation were equally outrageous: locked in terrible family feuds, refusing to accept the results of their own internal elections of aldermen and mayor, flouncing out of meetings, and constantly suing each other in the courts. I always like a world where no one is entirely good, no one is entirely bad, and apparently straightforward moral questions are mired in ambiguity.

Moreover, eighteenth-century elections were gloriously comic affairs too, being a kind of carnival even for those who couldn’t vote – and especially entertaining since there was no such thing as a secret ballot, and every voter was obliged to announce his choice in public, to the hoots – and possible physical retribution – of his opponents. Wild, libellous accusations of wrongdoing were rife, along with obscene but very funny songs, especially if ladies chose to involve themselves in the hustings. “If for the Man of the People you’ll poll/You may tickle a Duchess’s tol de rol lol,” they sang in the Westminster election of 1784 – a song I shamelessly stole and reworded for Scarlet Town.

Moving the election to 1796 when Laurence returned to Cornwall from America – and adding Toby, the “Sapient” fortune-telling Hog, along with a juicy murder – set the stage for Laurence to begin a new adventure at home in Cornwall, among the beautiful streets which he and I know and love so well.

Scarlet Town by Leonora Nattrass is out now (Viper, £16.99)

1796. A rigged election. A town at war. A murderer at large. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's hometown of Helston, Cornwall, in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. But it is no easy matter, thanks to the machinations of the rival political factions, not to mention the riotous performances of Toby the Sapient Hog. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands.