‘Writing up a Storm’ by KJ Maitland

 

The train stranded in the snow, the hotel on an island in a thunderstorm, or the remote village cut off by a landslide – they are classic set ups employed by generations of novelists and screenwriters. You assemble a cast of disparate characters, lure them to an isolated place and ensure freak weather or some other natural disaster prevents them from escaping or summoning help. These plots work so well, because they put the characters under stress, create danger and, just like disasters in real life, bring out the best and the worst in people.

In most of these scenarios, the weather or natural disaster is there to create a crucible in which to trap the characters and watch them fight it out like rats in a cage. But often there is only limited interaction between the characters and the weather or disaster. The focus is on the interplay between the characters inside the crucible. One brave soul will probably go for help, and we will see them stagger back inside defeated, covered in snow. The tension will be ratcheted up when the storm cuts the lights and phone – never an excuse a medieval crime writer has to invent. But the weather or disaster is really the scenery, the cage, and the ‘sympathetic background’ that we all remember from school essays. But for me, weather extremes and disasters can become the warp thread through which the plot is woven, rather than simply the background to it. I like to think of these disasters as living characters within the plot, with their own moods and personalities. 

Real disasters or extreme weather has been the starting point and core inspiration for the most of my historical thrillers. ‘Company of Liars’ was set in 1348, the year of the first outbreak of the Black Death in England. The plague, though it is not their principal enemy, is viewed by the characters as a beast, a creature following their scent, which they try to outrun as it pursues them across England. Creating the sense that the disease is an animal who is hunting them, even as they try to escape a human killer, helps to heighten the atmosphere of fear and threat felt by the characters. 

But the weather is equally important in this novel. In 1348, it rained every day from Midsummer’s Day until Christmas. That’s what drove people to congregate indoors and spread the pneumonic version of the plague which devasted England. But I wanted the readers to feel that the rain is a sullen and moody companion trudging along beside the characters. At times, they try to ignore the miserable grouch, yet he is always there, annoying them. I hoped the readers would get a sense of how sapping the constant rain must have been both to body and spirit. Of course, if in a novel the rain comes at the end of a prolonged drought then it would be an entirely different character and personality.

In contrast, ‘The Plague Charmer’ is set 1361, during the 2nd wave of the Black Death which, unlike the first, targeted the young and fit. The characters in this novel were not travellers on the road, but trapped in a village, and each viewed the plague in different ways, just as in life every person relates differently to the same individual. Some perceived the plague as a malevolent cloud that could sense your fear and would be drawn to you. Others regarded it as a vengeful angel leading them triumphantly into battle and cutting down their enemies. The former jester in the novel tells the readers – ‘The owls knew it was coming. The villagers knew it was coming. Even I knew it was coming.’ Whatever form it takes, for all of the characters in the novel, this plague is not simply a sickness but a sentient presence, which makes it more unnerving and adds another layer of menace to the deadly pandemic.

My new Jacobean thriller, ‘The Drowned City,’ opens with a real historical event, the Bristol tsunami which, in January 1606, devastated the south west coast of England and Wales. I could have used the flood as a classic crucible setting, a group of villagers marooned by water, struggling to survive. But this was a disaster that sent shock waves through the whole country, even in places untouched by the giant wave, and with it came the fear that the massive destruction of ports and shipping would leave England open to invasion. 

Those characters who live by the coast view the sea storming onto the land as a jealous mistress who feels neglected and must be placated. Others regard the giant wave as a monster or golem summoned by the Devil. Some see it as a savage guard dog that God has been holding back but has now unleashed to drive out the wicked. How each character personifies the flood in turn influences how they perceive the flood victims – the dead must have been sinners; the dead were innocents murdered by those who summoned the monster; the dead were simply unlucky. 

While both flood and fire destroy, a flood also reveals the buried corpses, ‘like a fanatical preacher determined to cleanse the world and expose all that was hidden. A man’s chamber pot hung upon a church cross; a bloodstained shift fluttered from a treetop; a forbidden holy relic was dumped on a drowned pig.’ And so, in the novel, the flood also becomes a character bent on exposing the secretive underworld of Jacobean treachery and spies.

An author doesn’t need to spell out to readers the character and personality of the weather or disaster as they imagine it. In ‘Company of Liars’, I don’t explicitly use the image of a crotchety curmudgeon when describing the rain. But if the novelist can imagine it as a living entity, and ask themselves what guise it would present to each of the human characters, then weather and disasters can become much more than a device to explain why the lights have gone out.

KJ Maitland’s new Jacobean crime-thriller series, set in world of spies and fugitive priests, begins with The Drowned City, published by Headline, 1^st April 2021.

KJ Maitland has previously written eight medieval thrillers under the name of Karen Maitland, and also writes as one of the Medieval Murderers.

The Drowned City by K J Maitland (Out Now)

1606. A year to the day that men were executed for conspiring to blow up Parliament, a towering wave devastates the Bristol Channel. Some proclaim God's vengeance. Others seek to take advantage. In London, Daniel Pursglove lies in prison waiting to die. But Charles FitzAlan, close adviser to King James I, has a job in mind that will free a man of Daniel's skill from the horrors of Newgate. If he succeeds. For Bristol is a hotbed of Catholic spies, and where better for the lone conspirator who evaded arrest, one Spero Pettingar, to gather allies than in the chaos of a drowned city? Daniel journeys there to investigate FitzAlan's lead, but soon finds himself at the heart of a dark Jesuit conspiracy - and in pursuit of a killer.

E C Fremantle On Crossing to the Dark Side

Sometimes a story insists on being told in a particular way. When I started work on The Poison Bed I had published four novels about historical women embroiled in the dangerous power play of the Tudor and Elizabethan courts. The place and time of their setting was defined by jeopardy, when those who stepped out of lived under the threat of execution. These novels certainly had elements of the political thriller; but my aim in writing them was primarily to shine a light on these remarkable and half-forgotten women.

I had assumed I would take a similar approach when writing about the infamous beauty Frances Howard. A contemporary portrait shows her looking out at the viewer with a knowing half-smile. Her gaze is unusually direct, seeming to challenge the prevailing notion that women of her time should be seen and not heard. This image captivated me and when I dug into her story, discovering that she was at the heart of a scandal that rocked the Jacobean court right up to its highest echelons, I knew I wanted to explore her life and the notorious murder trial in which she became ensnared.

The Jacobean period was an age steeped in paranoia with divided political and religious loyalties, giving rise to some of the bloodiest dramas ever staged. I only had to think of Othello, Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi, with their themes of revenge, power and manipulation to understand that the atmosphere of my novel would be dark and fraught with tension and danger. Central to Jacobean tragedy is the figure of the disruptive female.  Clever, mysterious and dangerous, these women seemed to me the forerunners to the femmes fatales of classic noir films. Invariably in Jacobean tragedy a woman is blamed for the collapse of moral order in much the same way as Frances Howard was blotted by the scandal that surrounded her.

On researching her story, it seemed clear to me that the Howards had used Frances as a pawn for their political ambitions. The Howards were a powerful and ruthless bunch who saw an opportunity to align themselves closely to the King by marrying Frances off to the royal favourite Robert Carr. Carr was a man on the rise but the proposed marriage was not a straightforward business, because Frances already had a husband. Behaving much like a mafia don, the Howard paterfamilias negotiated an annulment which initiated the beginnings of the scandal Frances became caught in. But then a man who had vehemently opposed the annulment was found dead, poisoned whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the newlyweds found themselves under arrest.

The more I explored the historical record, the more I came to understand that the circumstances of this murder were considerably more complex than they first seemed. There were several people in very high places for whom the death might have been most convenient. It seemed possible, probably even, that there had been a cover-up and various plea bargains that obscured the real circumstances of the case. The truth remained frustratingly elusive and I came to see, in a light-bulb moment, that the only way to recount Frances’s story was to place this crime, with all its untied ends, right at its heart.

It became clear that Frances and Robert would each narrate their separate stories, so the reader could understand the circumstances of this controversial marriage from two differing perspectives. In my mind it had become a tale of Jacobean noir, dependent on a central femme fatale, intricate plotting, pace and the meticulous, slow release of information. As such it had more in common with its contemporary cousin, the twisty, domestic psychological page-turner, than the historical court novel I had initially imagined. I had no choice but to write it as a thriller.

Now I have turned to the dark side it would seem there is no going back and I am working on a companion piece to The Poison Bed, a revenge thriller, inspired by another true crime, called The Honey and the Sting, to be published next year.

The Poison Bed by E. C. Fremantle will be published in hardback by Michael Joseph on 14th June.

 A Marriage. A Murder. One of them did it. Which of them will die for it? In the autumn of 1615 scandal rocks the Jacobean court when a celebrated couple are imprisoned on suspicion of murder. She is young, captivating and from a notorious family. He is one of the richest and most powerful men in the kingdom. Some believe she is innocent; others think her wicked or insane. He claims no knowledge of the murder. The king suspects them both, though it is his secret at stake. Who is telling the truth? Who has the most to lose? And who is willing to commit murder?