Thomas Mogford from Contemporary Crime Fiction to Historical Crime Fiction

I was fascinated to read the recent buzz about Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s switch from historical fiction to contemporary crime. The move seems to have been an astute one, with rumours of 20-way screen-rights bidding wars already abounding – (is ‘fascinated’ the right word, you may be asking – but it is, honestly, no jealousy at all, zero, zilch).

The news made me think of the fluid lines that separate crime and historical fiction. Authors seem to move from one to the other quite regularly – Anna Mazzola has recently switched from historical to legal thrillers, and some guy called Shakespeare even made the move, dumping his history cycle to plunge into the contemporary world of Elizabethan mores in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

My own – marginally less-heralded – switch came in 2022, when I published a Victorian-set novel called The Plant Hunter, after writing a series of five contemporary crime books. The change was less discombobulating than I had imagined. My crime novels, the Spike Sanguinetti series, are set in present-day Gibraltar. I did not grow up on the Rock myself, but had passed through there one summer, and been intrigued by the fact that so many of the names on the shop doors were of Italian rather than Spanish or British extraction. I dug into this anomaly on my return home, and discovered that the majority of Gibraltarians can trace their ancestry back to Genoese migrants who settled on the Rock during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Deciding that Gibraltar might make for an unusual and unexplored crime setting, I hopped on the cheapest EasyJet and booked myself into a B&B in the heart of the old town. Wandering around the narrow streets with a notebook and disposable camera, I tried to imagine my way into the life of a local Gibraltarian. Where had I been born? Where had I gone to school? Where did my friends and family live? Slowly, I built up the texture of Spike Sanguinetti’s life, and Shadow of the Rock, the first book in the series, came into being.

The process of imagining my way into the world of Victorian London and China (for The Plant Hunter), and more recently of Restoration-era London and Essex (for my new book, The Saffron Thief) was remarkably similar. The only difference was that I couldn’t physically walk the locations, so had to take books and maps as my guide (the work of the late lamented Liza Picard was particularly useful). It seemed that crime and historical settings were in fact close cousins.

But similarities also lead to dangers. In both cases, I took a tumble into the same pitfall. With the crime series, I was so immersed in Gibraltar and its ways that I overlooked the need for a well-worked and compelling plot. As a result, my first attempt at a novel set in Gibraltar (titled The Hollow Mountain) found me an agent, but not a publisher. People seemed to enjoy the start of the book, and its setting, but then the grip on the reader began to recede. I had fallen so much in love with the setting, it seemed, that I had overlooked the need to make the mechanics of the book work. I had to scrap that novel, and start again, spending all my time on plot, safe in the knowledge that I had learnt enough about the setting to let it seep out as I wrote. The result, several years later, was Shadow of the Rock, and I was back in business.

I swore to myself that I would not make the same mistake when it came to historical fiction – but I did. Before starting The Plant Hunter, I reread reams of Dickens, and gorged myself on contemporary accounts of 19^th-century China (Sir Robert Hart’s journals were particularly useful). I then began to write the book in dense Victorian vernacular, painstakingly crafting each sentence to sound appropriate to the era. It was a monster effort, and I was sure that readers would find themselves astonished by the act of ventriloquism. They weren’t. In fact, I soon found myself without both agent and publisher.

In the end, I had to scrap that first historical book too, and start afresh, focusing on plot and character, and hoping – once again – that my research would percolate through while I was telling the story. In the end, the new, better-plotted version seemed to work (minus the cod Victorian language), and my writing career was back on track.

So – conclusions about the switch between the two genres, the leap from CWA to HWA, if you will. The similarities between the two genres make the move appealing, and eminently doable. But beware becoming so immersed in setting – be that a physical one in contemporary crime, or a temporal one in historical fiction – that you overlook the key truth. Readers quickly take wherever or whenever a book is set for granted and start to look for something more than that – strong writing, well-developed characters and page-turning plotting being foremost among them.

The Saffron Thief (HarperCollins Publisher) Out Now

In 1666, England's saffron industry is booming, with the spice fetching a staggering £4 per pound—rivalling gold. Fabian Smith, the sensible second son of a Holborn poulterer, has sacrificed his dreams of adventure for family duty. But when the Great Fire claims his father and his reckless brother plunges them into debt with a ruthless conman, their home—and freedom—hang in the balance. Desperate to save his family, Fabian hatches a daring plan: steal the fortune they need. His target? The wealthiest saffron grower in Saffron Walden. Disguised and determined, he arrives just in time for the harvest, only to discover that the townsfolk are far more cunning than he expected. As danger closes in, Fabian must navigate treachery and his own heart, racing against time to save everything he holds dear.

More information about Thomas and his books can be found on his website. He can also be found on Instagram @tlmogford on X @ThomasMogford