Depending on the kindness of history by Steven Veerapen

Sometimes history can be kind to novelists. Occasionally, characters suggest themselves and, even more rarely, the historical record presents us with themes and ideas we’re already hoping to explore. History was very kind to me as I set about writing a Tudor-era murder mystery. Not only was Henry VIII’s suspicion-filled, blood-soaked royal court tailor made for intrigue, dark deeds and skulking figures, but the record of his reign threw up exactly the type of character who might work as a detective. 

In studying the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll, which captured in a series of images the celebratory jousts held to welcome Henry’s short-lived son, the “New Year’s Prince” into the world, I encountered a figure who has recently come under serious scholarly scrutiny. John Blanke - a tiny figure depicted twice, blowing his trumpet from the vellum margins of the narrative images - has the distinction of being one of the first (if not the first) black people in England whose name was recorded. Thus, he has recently sparked interest as scholars have scrambled to discover how he came to be depicted as a member (albeit a minor one) of Henry’s court, and how he came to be in England at all. The consensus is that he probably arrived with the retinue of Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon (who hailed from a united Spain which had conquered the “Moors” and begun transporting slaves from North Africa).

John’s story, however, wasn’t mine to tell. Again, though, history was kind; not only did John marry but he probably married an Englishwoman (we know, for example, that he was given gifts from the Tudors on the occasion of his wedding and that he had the clout to ask for higher wages - and there is no record of any black women in England during his time in service). As he disappears from the record in the late 1510s, I was left with - if you’ll excuse the pun - a blank.

I was also left with an idea. If John Blanke married an Englishwoman, it is possible - even likely - that the aim was to produce children (marriages in the period being generally more for the purposes of procreation than love or companionship). Any resulting child, born of two races, had a story I knew I could tell. Suddenly, given my own heritage (my mum being from Pollok and my dad from Mauritius!), I had a character I knew I could write - and one with ties, via his father, to the court of Henry VIII.

Devising and plotting any murder mystery relies on the construction of a detective figure, whether an amateur or a professional: we all know Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Lord Peter Wimsey. If writing a mystery set in the sixteenth century, one is virtually forced to go down the amateur route; there was no police force in Tudor England and there were no professional detectives.

What there was, however, was a great deal of law (even if it seems there was often very little justice). Henry VIII’s England, indeed, had officers at every level: urban aldermen; city watchmen (often respectable homeowners who farmed out the actual work to inferiors); local justices of the peace; constables; march wardens; churchwardens (who worked in and with ecclesiastical courts, whose jurisdiction covered spiritual crimes, such as adultery); and coroners (who were appointed rather than trained, and who held juried inquests into unexplained deaths). Yet the actual grind of investigative work was essentially up for grabs; a killer was, in all likelihood, going to get away with his or her crimes if those questioned at the inquest stage either fingered the wrong person or had no idea how a victim came to die. In order to be caught, a murderer very often had to be caught in the act or to have left a clear trail of evidence.

Into this confused world I launched Anthony Blanke, son of John, who follows in his father’s footsteps in working for the great (if not the good) in the 1520s – these the boon days of Henrician England, when Reformation was only distantly on the horizon. Once again, history – particularly that Westminster Tournament Roll – was good to me. On looking at it again, it struck me that a marginal figure (as Anthony Blanke would have to be, in various ways) was best placed to observe the comings and goings at his master, Cardinal Wolsey’s court. What better figure than a trumpeter, paid to be heard and not seen, and to lurk in alcoves and doorways, to spot shady dealings and piece together clues? I hope those who read “Of Blood Descended” find him and his world as much fun as I did.

 Of Judgment Fallen by Steven Veerapen (Birlinn General) Out Now

Spring, 1523. Henry VIII readies England for war with France. The King’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, prepares to open Parliament at Blackfriars. The eyes of the country turn towards London. But all is not well in Wolsey’s household. A visiting critic of the Cardinal is found brutally slain whilst awaiting an audience at Richmond Palace. He will not be the last to die. Anthony Blanke, trumpeter and groom, is once again called upon to unmask a murderer. Joining forces with Sir Thomas More, he is forced to confront the unpopularity of his master’s rule. As the bodies of the Cardinal’s enemies mount up around him, Anthony finds himself under suspicion. Journeying through the opulence of More’s home, the magnificence of Wolsey’s York Place, and the dank dungeons of London’s gaols, he must discover whether the murderer of the Cardinal’s critics is friend or foe. With time running out before Parliament sits, Anthony must clear his name and catch the killer before the King’s justice falls blindly upon him.

More information about Steven Veerapen and his books can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @stevenveerapen.

Cover Story: The Life of Crime – by Martin Edwards

Writers like me hate to admit it, but when it comes to selling books, the cover artwork is just as important as the contents. Booksellers make judgments about what to stock based on the cover artwork they see in publishers’ catalogues. Book buyers, too, are drawn to some covers rather than others. And the same is even true online, where the ‘thumbnail’ image of a book poses special design challenges. So when I was working on my history of crime fiction, The Life of Crime, I kept wondering how my publishers, HarperCollins, would approach the question of the cover.

I was truly delighted to be told that the brief had been given to Steve Leard. Steve is a freelance graphic designer based in Plymouth, specialising in book design, branding and illustration. After initially getting his break in the publishing world by working at Bloomsbury, he now regularly designs covers for publishers both large and small and around the world. I was already familiar with his meticulous approach because he’d designed the wonderful artwork for a previous book of mine. This was Howdunit, a book about the art and graft of crime writing which I put together to celebrate the Detection Club’s ninetieth birthday – so it contained essays by ninety different writers.

‘Sometimes,’ Steve explained, ‘the challenge itself is actually the key to solving the design problem. With so many names to fit on one cover, a device was needed to carry them all. Crime covers often use certain tropes to identify the genre, so using a fingerprint on a crime cover isn't exactly ground-breaking, but trying to use it in a different way to give this book a twist seemed like a good idea and could help to house all of the names. I liked the idea of seeing the cover from across the bookshop or as a small thumbnail on Amazon and initially seeing something suggesting a fingerprint, but then the closer you look you realise it’s actually made of lots of names.’

The practicalities are all-important, Steve explained: ‘I initially created the design on the computer using Illustrator. From early on in the process I was keen to create a rubber stamp to physically print the design, which would add to the feel of it being an actual fingerprint. This could have been achieved to a degree on the computer, but for me, you can’t beat physically producing work away from the computer to achieve a better result. It may seem like a small detail to some, but those details mean everything really. Once the cover had been approved by the publishers, I contacted Blade Rubber Stamps in London, who turned the design into a rubber stamp, which I then printed and scanned back onto the computer.

 I suggested to him that another challenge was to retain the simplicity of the design, which is what gives the cover its strength. ‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘It’s quite unusual in trade publishing to have no hierarchy on the cover, so not clearly having the title of the book large and clearly defined. Credit for this has to go to Claire Ward – the Art Director at Harper Collins. I’m still not sure how she managed to get this cover approved without any major changes, but I’m very pleased she did!’ Me too. The book proceeded to win the H.R.F. Keating award and was nominated for four other major prizes in Britain and the US.

The Life of Crime is a very different book, in that the contents are all my own work, rather than a combination of pieces by ninety different authors. Given that the scope of the book is wide-ranging, it made sense for Steve to focus on a relatively simple (yet eye-catching) image to give a flavour of the book, rather than trying to reflect the complexity of the genre’s evolution since the late eighteenth century, since that might risk creating an impression of clutter.

‘After the success of Howdunit,’ Steve says, ‘I wanted The Life of Crime to feel part of the same design family, so when the design had been approved I once again had a rubber stamp made to give that textured feel that worked so well on the previous book. Like Howdunit, the challenge with this cover was creating something that fits into the crime/thriller market, but not heavily relying on genre tropes and cliches. I wanted this book to feel big and iconic, to reflect the fact that it is the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years.’

As I’m writing this article ahead of publication, I’ve no idea how critics and readers will react to The Life of Crime. But at least I’m confident of one thing. It looks good on the shelf!

The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins) Out 26th May 2022.

In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction. Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers' Association and series consultant to the British Library's highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars. The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative - and readable - study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors - from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell - into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.

More information about Martin Edwards and his work can be found on his website. You can also follow himon Twitter @medwardsbooks and also on Facebook.

Based on A True Story by Kate Morgan

The words ‘based on true events’ always adds an extra frisson to dramas or films, especially those that involve that most notorious of crimes – murder.   While researching my book ‘Murder: The Biography’, I came across this collision of fact and fiction time and time again.  The recurring influence of these stories in dramas, books and films shows that our collective fascination with murder and murderers continued unabated.  It predates our contemporary obsession with true crime documentaries by several centuries.  In the Middle Ages, strolling minstrels composed and sang ‘moritats’ (‘murder ballads’) about infamous crimes.  These warbled morality tales were the earliest true crime documentaries, turning tales of murder into a macabre oral history, with a heavy dash of folklore to boot.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, the tradition of the murder ballad had evolved into depictions of grisly cases on the stage.  The 1817 murder of Mary Ashford in the countryside around Birmingham was a prime example.  Mary’s body was dredged from a pond early one spring morning; her assumed assailant Abraham Thornton was acquitted of her murder at trial and the case has never been officially solved.  Her death was the subject of inspired several stage plays, all of which leaned  heavily towards melodrama.  I didn’t have room to include the infamous Red Barn murder in the book, but in a similar vein, this 1827 shooting of Maria Marten in Suffolk inspired a cottage industry of novellas, plays and songs.  Like the Ashford case, the brutal killing of a young woman in a rural setting caught the public imagination and plenty of dramatic licence was used to fill in the gaps and translate the story to the stage.

Towards the end of the century, the burgeoning tabloid newspaper industry spotted the draw of crime stories and a new national obsession was born.  The Illustrated Police News was the go-to publication for true crime fans and I came across its lurid stories while researching cases from that era.  It’s coverage of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 made it famous and the News’ depictions of Jack the Ripper’s victims are instantly recognisable even today.  The paper’s bloodthirsty coverage of the trial of Frederick Baker for the murder of eight year old Fanny Adams was a useful source on the case and a revealing insight into contemporary attitudes to murder and its depiction in the press.  In another mingling of fact and fiction, historian Peter Ackroyd quoted apocryphal coverage from the Illustrated Police News in his novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, to add period atmosphere to his story of a string of brutal murders in East London, inspired by the Ripper. 

In the twentieth century, our tastes for true crime became a little more nuanced and some controversial cases would cast long shadows, both in society and in pop culture as well.  The book looks in some detail at the 1950s murder convictions of Ruth Ellis, Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans; and there was no shortage of material, both factual and dramatic, to plough through on each of these cases.  All three were executed for murder with heavy question marks looming over their convictions.  Evans was wrongly scapegoated for murders at Rillington Place in London, which were actually the work of serial killer John Christie; Bentley was put to death for the murder of a policeman despite the fact that he had not fired the fatal shot; and Ellis hanged for the shooting of her abusive boyfriend outside a Hampstead pub.  The cases were all the subject of films – 10 Rillington Place, Let Him Have It and Dance with a Stranger respectively, each of which is a minor gem of British filmmaking.  The contentious executions at the heart of each case meant that hangman Albert Pierrepoint made a cameo appearance in all three of the stories, and I read plenty about the amiable executioner, who ran a pub when he wasn’t presiding over executions.  He finally got his own biopic in 2005, when he was played by Timothy Spall in the film Pierrepoint. 

With her platinum blonde hair and a Smith & Wesson clutched in her manicured hand, Ellis herself could have sprung from the pages of a noir fiction novel.  Indeed, her case caught the attention of American novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of private eye Philip Marlowe, who was in London at the time of her trial.  He was sufficiently moved by the death sentence to write to the London Evening Standard to protest at the savagery of the English courts in hanging a woman. 

With a topic as big as murder, it’s impossible to fit in every case I came across, even some of the really juicy ones.  With regret, I had to bypass the cautionary tale of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, the lovers who were both executed for murder in 1923, after Bywaters had fatally stabbed Thompson’s husband.  I’d already decided to use the sad story of Derek Bentley to cover the tricky issue of joint enterprise posed by the case.  But the glamorous Thompson and her lodger turned lover Bywaters have inspired a wealth of crime fiction – Agatha Christie alluded to the case in a couple of books and Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel The Documents in the Case draws heavily on the murder.  More recently, the influence of the story can be seen in Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests.

My book is very much rooted in the factual, exploring the history of the law of homicide and the real-life cases that have shaped it down the centuries.  But I found that these fictionalised accounts can tell their own stories about infamous murders and more widely, about our obsession with crime in all its forms.  After all, the scariest stories are always the ones that are true. 

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Harper Collins) Out Now

Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder.  The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction.  There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.

 

Midnight at Malabar House: Writing that difficult second series

After five novels and two novellas in the Baby Ganesh Agency series, my next book is a historical crime novel set in 1950 in India. It's called Midnight at Malabar House and introduces Inspector Persis Wadia of the Bombay Police, India's first female police detective. 

So… why would I leave behind a successful series, published across 15 languages, and instead go back to the drawing board and all the nerve-wracking uncertainty that comes with launching a new idea? 

Writing a new series is a daunting prospect, rather like trying to begin a new relationship following a divorce – but, in my case, without the divorce. Fans of the Baby Ganesh Agency have besieged me with letters, emails and tweets expressing their alarm that there may be no more books in the series. I offer here the same explanation I have given them. 

As a writer, you have certain milestones that you want to achieve. Get published. Get published around the world. Get nice reviews. Achieve a bestseller. Win an award or two. Establish a connection with your ‘reader base’. Having now ticked off everything on that list, I came to a point where I wanted to challenge myself. Could I do it all over again? And if so, could I come up with an idea that excited me and that would appeal to readers too – both my current ones and a new audience? 

The Baby Ganesh books are set in modern India, featuring Inspector Ashwin Chopra and the baby elephant sent into his care. I lived in India for a decade and these books are my chronicle of a country that has undergone an incredible transformation over the past two decades. 

But modern India is also a reflection of her past. 

India’s historical legacy permeates everything you see on the streets of a place like Mumbai (once Bombay), from the slums to antiquated cultural attitudes. A large part of that legacy is tied up with the Raj, and the cataclysmic end to that period in late 1947.

Midnight at Malabar House opens on New Year’s Eve 1949, just two years after Independence, the horrors of Partition, and the assassination of Gandhi. India is still trying to work out what sort of democracy it is going to be. Social, political and religious turmoil is rife in the country. Economic reform is pitting the old nawabs, maharajas and feudal classes against the newly enfranchised masses. Yet Bombay remains in its own bubble, incredibly cosmopolitan, a city of jazz and self-indulgence, with tens of thousands of foreigners still living and working in the city. 

As India celebrates the arrival of this momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia, still the only woman on the force, is summoned to the Bombay home of English diplomat Sir James Herriot. Herriot has been murdered. Soon, Persis, accompanied by Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, finds herself leading an investigation that becomes more political by the second… 

This new series is my way of drawing together the threads of India’s past and using them to shed light on India’s present. It is also a celebration of female pioneers on the subcontinent. Indian society has a reputation for being intensely patriarchal. Even now many women struggle to enjoy the same rights that women in other countries take for granted. Persis, however, is a woman who refuses to be told what her place in the new India should be. She believes in herself and in her own notions of justice and equality. She is a singular woman, fierce, committed, intelligent, a trailblazer in a sea of antipathy. 

I would love for you to join her on this journey.

Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan (Published by Hodder and Stoughton) 

Bombay, New Year's Eve, 1949. As India celebrates the arrival of a momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia stands vigil in the basement of Malabar House, home to the city's most unwanted unit of police officers. Six months after joining the force she remains India's first female police detective, mistrusted, sidelined and now consigned to the midnight shift. And so, when the phone rings to report the murder of prominent English diplomat Sir James Herriot, the country's most sensational case falls into her lap. As 1950 dawns and India prepares to become the world's largest republic, Persis, accompanied by Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, finds herself investigating a case that is becoming more political by the second. Navigating a country and society in turmoil, Persis, smart, stubborn and untested in the crucible of male hostility that surrounds her, must find a way to solve the murder - whatever the cost.

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St Hilda's Virtual Crime Fiction, 14/15 August - now bookable

The suspense is finally over. Booking for the 2020 Virtual Crime Fiction Event is open!

The Committee, our Hon Fellows-in-Crime, and I, are delighted to report that all the speakers planned for 2020 will be joining us for this live virtual event running from Friday evening through to Saturday evening.

Our theme remains ‘All Our Yesterdays’: historical crime fiction.
Find yourself unleashed upon the London of the Swinging Sixties, the winding backstreets of 1950s Bombay, the gin shops and brothels of Georgian London, and backstage on Brighton pier - all in pursuit of Murder.

 We shall we have the traditional Guest Of Honour session and the dramatic Whodunnit, both courtesy of Andrew Taylor, without whom no historical crime fiction event would be complete.

Whodunnit: The Murder Of Lucy Ackroyd 
is a chillingly implausible tale set in Oxford.
The hideous murder of a literary novelist takes place in a former women’s
college located in the academic badlands beyond Magdalen Bridge.
Starring: Chief Inspector Andrew Taylor, Val McDermid, Sarah Hilary,
Abir Mukherjee, and Mick Herron.
(And yours truly as the Senior Tutor, 'a woman of strong but warped passions'.)

So, please, head over to the website, peruse the programme, the speakers and
their subjects, both fresh meat and usual suspects.

We look forward to seeing you.

Truth and Historical Fiction by Owen Matthews

When a nuclear bomb detonates, the ground for miles around the test site is littered with dead birds. Scared by the flash they take flight, but are burned and blinded by the wave of intense heat that follows seconds later. Scientists driving across the corpse-littered plain to inspect ground zero stop when they see scorched eagles, flapping in agony, and put the crippled birds out of their misery with a well-aimed kick to the head. 

This is true. It’s mentioned by Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, in his memoirs. I use this detail, and hundreds of others like it, in my novel Black Sun. The characters listen to the actual hit records covet the latest fashions and consumer goods available in the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1961 - all drawn from memoirs, films, TV shows, of the time. Most importantly of all, the central plot of my book is closely based on the true story of RDS-220, the biggest thermonuclear device ever built - and how Sakharov ordered a radical redesign of his weapon just ten days before its detonation because he truly feared that the device might set the planet’s atmosphere on fire. The details of the bomb’s size, shape and power, how it was transported, loaded onto a plane and dropped, are all based exactly on Sakharov and others’ descriptions. 

The question I’d like to explore is - why is it important that it’s true? I’m writing a novel, not a historical account. My fiction is a classic detective story set in train by the poisoning of a brilliant young nuclear physicist by eradicative thallium. That never happened. There was no talented but troubled KGB investigator called Alexander Vasin; the creator of RDS-220 never had a beautiful but psychologically damaged young wife. I’m telling a story which I made up - so why weave my fiction round the pillars of real events? If the true story is so extraordinary, why fictionalise it? Or, conversely, if your fiction is so compelling, why drag real history and real people into it? 

Hilary Mantel has the best answer. “You become a novelist not to tell entertaining lies but to tell the truth,” she said in her recent, brilliant, Reith lecture on exploring the impulses behind why we write historical fiction. “All novelists are concerned with lives unlived … we seek to know things about the past they the past did not know about itself.”

The resonates. You read a history book about extraordinary events, and you want to see it come alive, to be inside the heads and hearts of the protagonists. Even the most candid and well-written memoirs - Anais Nin, for instance, or Marguerite Duras - never read quite like novels. It’s only when they take a step away from the real and into the realm of imagination, become, in the latest coinage, auto-fiction rather than autobiography. The same holds true for biography and history. The facts can be moving, terrifying, unbelievable. But it only becomes emotionally real when you get inside the mind of the historical protagonist. A mind that by definition we can only imagine. 

Some critics have attacked historical fiction as being un-literary. James Wood, writing in The New Yorker, called it a "somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness.” Mantel, and before her Barry Unsworth and Gore Vidal and Robert Graves, give the lie to that. Mantel is unusual because in her Cromwell trilogy she sticks so very closely to the known facts. Reading Diarmid Maculloch’s biography of Cromwell one comes across not only a cast of names but also houses, landscapes, even the texts of legislation that feel entirely familiar from Mantel’s fiction. 

Does making fiction as real, as historically accurate, as possible make it better fiction? Certainly, authenticity of place and period gives a book an unmistakable patina and texture that is best drawn from life. For instance the vividly detailed description of the assassin’s drive across France in The Day of the Jackal (an piece of what might call semi-contemporary historical fiction, constructed around historical events just a decade before it was written) had to have been lived by the author to be told in such convincing detail. But the real purpose of historical minutiae - the thick paper of the hotel ledger, the tightness of the wheel of the assassin’s speeding sports car, the smoky perfume scent of a Parisian underground gay bar - is to add truth, depth and believable background to the fictional lives you’re striving as a writer to make convincing. As Barry Unsworth told an interviewer, "I don't really care how many buttons someone had on his waistcoat. It would be good to get it right, but what really matters is trying to get hold of the spirit of the age, what it was like to be alive in that age, what it felt like to be…an ordinary person in the margins of history.”

In Black Sun, the terrifying power of the real-life RDS-220 and the terrifying choices faced by its creators make the backdrop to the human drama of my thriller - but they are also the driving dramatic force. As I write in the afterword, “the bomb-makers of [the secret nuclear city of] Arzamas-16 had finally touched the outer limit of science. They had created a bomb too powerful for the Earth to withstand. And they stepped back.” That was the genesis of the book - not a plot and collection of characters in search of a historical venue on which to alight but a historian’s fascination with an actual human situation faced by real people within living memory who held the fate of the planet in their hands. 

That is perhaps the only real difference between historical fiction and literary fiction - the initial impulse to colour in, to flesh out, to understand a real event by fictionalising it. And, to unpack the paradox at the heart of Mantel’s thought earlier, by making history into fiction we are trying to make it more true. As mantel put it in her lecture, “a myth is not a falsehood - it is the truth cast into symbol.”

“The term historical fiction is a blunt instrument in literary criticism,” said Unsworth. “I write stories that are set in the past. Fiction set in the past should be judged by the same criteria as any other fiction. Does the novel convey a sense of life, touch the reader's mind and heart? Does it belong to what D.H. Lawrence called the one bright book of life?”

Black Sun by Owen Matthews (Transworld Publishers) Out 9 July 2020.

1961. Hidden deep within the forests of central Soviet Russia is a place that doesn't appear on any map: a city called Arzamas-16. Here a community of dedicated scientists, technicians and engineers are building the most powerful nuclear device the world will ever see - three thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.  But ten days before the bomb is to be tested, a young physicist is found dead. His body contains enough radioactive poison to kill thousands.  The Arzamas authorities believe it is suicide - they want the corpse disposed of and the incident forgotten. But someone in Moscow is alarmed by what's going on in this strange, isolated place. And so Major Alexander Vasin - a mostly good KGB officer - is despatched to Arzamas to investigate. What he finds there is unlike anything he's experienced before. His wits will be tested against some of the most brilliant minds in the Soviet Union - eccentrics, patriots and dissidents who, because their work is considered to be of such vital national importance, have been granted the freedom to think and act, live and love as they wish.  In Arzamas, nothing can be allowed to get in the way of the project. Not even murder... Intricately researched, cunningly plotted and brilliantly told, Black Sun is a fast-paced and timely thriller set at the height - and in the heart - of Soviet power.

‘An inordinate fondness for beetles’….how I got hooked on bugs

I knew I couldn’t avoid it for much longer. She was being very tactful, not asking, not pushing, encouraging me to do whatever I wanted, but I was going to have to break the news to her at some point. And I knew how weird it sounded. How positively - how unmarketably - awful it seemed as a subject matter for a novel.  Eventually I decided that the direct approach was best so I phoned her.  ‘Stef,’ I said. ‘About my new novel. It’s…well…. I’ve become really interested in dung beetles…’

To my editor’s credit, she took it on the chin. Stef is, perhaps, used to my obsessions since my first novel involved killer whales.  The blame for this new beetle mania lies firmly at the feet of my friend Professor Helen Roy, who happens to be a world leading ladybird expert. Helen and I were out for a coffee one day; I was feckless, a bit lost, anxiously kicking around for inspiration for a new novel, and she was talking about her work on an alien, invasive, damaging species of ladybird, the Harlequin. As I listened to Helen, it occurred to me that having a sinister ladybird expert in my next book might be quite fun. But Helen, it turns out, is rather protective of her ladybirds, even the scary, invasive kind. She loves them deeply. The idea of a sinister ladybird expert clearly made her uneasy because she swiftly – almost seamlessly - introduced me to her friend Darren Mann, head of Life Collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. And Darren, it turns out, is a leading authority on the dung beetle.

In the musty back offices of the Museum of Natural History, all dark wood and tall windows, Darren showed me tray after tray of shiny, boiled sweet dung beetles, some as tiny as pin heads, some huge and lacquered and majestic. He explained their vast global diversity, their extraordinary, hidden world, how essential they are to our ecosystem, how vital in fertilizing and clearing British farm land, and how unrecognized they are, how threatened and misunderstood (there between 40 and 50 species of dung beetles in the UK alone and we are currently – madly - wiping them out with cattle wormers). Dung beetles, he explained, are also richly symbolic creatures: the scarab, the ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth and renewal, is a dung beetle. The ancient Egyptian sun god, Khepri, pushes his dung ball sun up over the horizon and buries it again each night, only to rise again the next morning. As I listened to Darren in those timeless Oxford museum back offices, the smell of camphor in my nostrils, specimens and journals and beetle-pinning equipment all around us, I knew I had my next book.

 

Of course, The Night Visitor isn’t just about dung beetles. It is about two very different women:  a glamorous historian and TV presenter, Olivia, who becomes locked in a confusing battle with her sixty year old research assistant, Vivian, as they try to write a biography of a Victorian murderess. It is about academic obsession, ambition and powerful women; lies, revenge and moral slipperiness.  There is a Victorian Diary, a holiday in the South of France, a Gothic Sussex manor house, a stalker, a lost rescue dog. But the beetle metaphor is there throughout, underpinning this unfolding human drama.

In the end I managed to include some ladybirds (they are beetles after all): Helen explained how the Harlequin ladybird has grown to mimic other ‘harmless’ ladybird species so effectively that even experts like her sometimes have trouble identifying which is which.  You could say the same for many humans...

I don’t really choose my inspiration, it chooses me:  I didn’t mean to obsess about dung beetles but that moment in the Museum offices, looking at the trays of beetles, listening to Darren, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Beetles make up a quarter of all the species on earth. When the famous Edwardian scientist J.B.S. Haldane was asked by theologians what the natural world could tell us about its Creator, he replied that God, should he exist, must have an ‘inordinate fondness for beetles’.  Having just spent two years talking to Coleopterists, gazing at these beautiful iridescent creatures and researching their habits and habitats, all I can say is: ‘me too.’

The Night Visitor is published by Quercus on 4th May 2017.

Professor Olivia Sweetman has worked hard to achieve the life she loves, with a high-flying career as a TV presenter and historian, three children and a talented husband. But as she stands before a crowd at the launch of her new bestseller she can barely pretend to smile. Her life has spiraled into deceit and if the truth comes out, she will lose everything.  Only one person knows what Olivia has done. Vivian Tester is the socially awkward sixty-year-old housekeeper of a Sussex manor who found the Victorian diary on which Olivia's book is based. She has now become Olivia's unofficial research assistant. And Vivian has secrets of her own.  As events move between London, Sussex and the idyllic South of France, the relationship between these two women grows more entangled and complex. Then a bizarre act of violence changes everything.

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