Social, Cultural and Political climate of Victorian England

How the social, cultural and political climate of Victorian England combined to create a perfect storm of crime, murder and sensationalism.

Kim Donovan, author of The Mysterious Mrs Hood, provides the historical backdrop to her great -great aunt’s murder in 1900.

England 1898 --It has been ten years since Jack the Ripper terrorised the streets of Whitechapel, London. Charles Booth and his team of socialists have been working on a project to map wealth and poverty across the city since 1886, and have recently named Stockwood Street, which was home to Mary Jane and Herbert Bennett, as being one of the ‘lowest class’ streets in Victorian London. It was at this point that Mary Jane and Herbert made a choice: to turn to crime to escape poverty. Mary Jane’s desperate struggle for survival had begun.

Charles Booth’s work would eventually result in a colour-coded map of the city, which carved out and demarcated the poorest streets with thick black lines. Booth classified these areas as being home to the ‘lowest classes.’ The notebooks that accompany Booth’s poverty map add vivid detail about the social character of each street, which helps to give us a sense of the conditions in which people were living at the time. Stockwood Street, a dingy thoroughfare off Plough Street, near Clapham Junction, was described as being awash with ‘drunken, rowdy and troublesome people’. It is easy to imagine the danger that may have lurked on the ‘vicious and semi-criminal’ street after dark. It is no surprise, then, that a heavily pregnant Mary Jane would have urgently sought to liberate herself from these challenging social conditions.

The researchers documenting the conditions on London’s streets would at times be accompanied by the police officer for the district in which they were charting. It was a time when officers walked their beats. Forensic science was in its infancy, and the police still relied heavily on clues to solve crimes. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Scotland Yard had been set up ten years before, and plain clothed police officers, who had originally been thought of as ‘spies’ had made significant strides in winning the trust of the public. Despite this more robust police force, Mary Jane and Herbert would successfully evade the scrutiny of the authorities as they travelled across the country, graduating from fraud to theft, and eventually to arson, while leaving a trail of disgruntled people in their wake.

When relations between the couple eventually began to sour, it is unlikely that they would have considered divorce. Although legal by that time, divorce was expensive and brought with it great shame, especially for women. Mary Jane would have been dependent on her marriage for reasons of reputation, and she would have been reliant on her husband for money.

Despite the great swathes of black on Booth’s map of London, social conditions across the country were being to improve. The Bank holiday Act of 1871 had introduced four regular bank holidays, which gave workers more time for leisure activities, and the development of the railways made it possible to travel longer distances with more ease. Seaside resorts had begun to spring up, and Great Yarmouth in particular became a popular holiday destination. It was here, on a holiday with her infant daughter in September 1900, that Mary Jane would meet her tragic end.

This increase in leisure time coincided with a rise in literacy levels and the development of a more affordable and less regulated press, which, in turn, led to a dramatic rise in newspaper readership. The Victorians had a reputation for being avid consumers of violent entertainments, and a new-fangled form of journalism dubbed ‘Tabloid Journalism’, or ‘Yellow Journalism’ (in North America) had started to develop. Articles in this style had a focus on bold headlines, emotive writing and sensationalist stories. They were, broadly speaking, a development of the Broadside, a type of street literature that had been infamously sold at public executions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The sensationalist reporting of crime was at odds with a legal system that required impartiality, and there were calls at the turn of the 20th Century to regulate the press through fear that sensationalist reporting would prejudice active cases. It was into this press that the story of Mary Jane’s murder found its way, and it was through a newspaper report that her father would learn of his daughter’s murder. The press whipped up such a frenzy around the case that the ensuing trial attracted attention from across the country and Mary Jane Bennett became a household name. She had escaped poverty, and her desperate struggle for survival had come to an end, but not in the way she would have hoped for.

The Mysterious Mrs Hood by Kim Donovan (Orion Publishing) Out Now

A true Victorian murder mystery... Great Yarmouth, September 1900: A young woman is found dead on the beach, a bootlace tied tightly around her neck. Despite her death attracting national attention in the press, nobody claims her. Detective Inspector Robert Lingwood of the Great Yarmouth police force declares he will not rest until the mystery of the young woman's death is solved. But it's only once the case has been referred to Scotland Yard that the layers of mystery start to peel away... 'Mrs Hood' was in fact Mary Jane Bennett, and this is her story. Following clues and tracking red herrings leads the police to close in on their one and only suspect. With arson, fraud, an affair and a sensation-hungry press, the murder gripped the nation in one of the most eagerly anticipated trials of the early twentieth century.

Kim Donovan can be found on X @Kim_Donovan_

Writing the Lure of Water

It was early autumn, a clear day with a cloud-scudded sky, and they had leapt into the water, their skin kissed by silver bubbles. They raced each other against the current, up to where the weeds stood tall, suspended in fronds, and the newly fallen leaves glowed like jewels from the bottom of the river. 

- Extract from SILENT WATERS, publishing 14th September.

What is it about the water that draws us? Is it that, like the flames of a fire, water is always moving? Are we hypnotised by it?

I am certainly drawn to writing about the water. I love the beauty of it, and the power it can wield. In truth, I fear it, and there's something wonderful about writing about what we fear. Perhaps that's why a lot of writers write. Because writing whatever 'fear' means to us enables us to explore something difficult. Most importantly, when we write 'The End', we have survived it.

Everyone knows water can be our friend – a clear blue lagoon, a holiday swimming pool for our kids. But it can also be a foe, and it's not just the obvious expanses of water we should look out for, like the dark shadow of the rip in the sea, or the rainfall that falls so fast and so heavy that it causes floods and landslides. No, quite often, the most dangerous areas of the water are the ones we don't think anything of; the village pond, the bathtub, the river we run alongside everyday. 

I found a way to write my enchantment with water into a thriller – and it was by exploring the profession of police diving. In SILENT WATERS, I explore the perils of it via my protagonist, Jen Harper, a full time police diver, as I was lucky enough to talk to a diver to research the book. I can verify for absolute certainty that diving is one of the toughest jobs within the police; it requires such grit and determination and patience and I have the utmost respect for anyone that specialises in it.

I asked my contact what drew them to police diving, and they had replied with the joyful simplicity that they loved the water: the depth and the murk of it, the smoothness of it and its rhythmic calm, how the light plays on the surface of it, but also, conversely, its blackest corners, too.

Police diving allows a variety of environment, and a variety of cases, but an officer that specialiaes within that unit doesn't hold the day to day grind that most police officers incur. Divers are never involved in the ‘whys’ of an investigation, only the hunting of what’s crucial to solve them. Divers do a job and then they move on, rarely finding out the resolutions of a case they’ve searched for. Quite often they find out what happened in a case when they see it on the news.

There’s nowhere underwater you can think of that a diver hasn’t been or won’t go; the sea, in lakes and rivers, canals, sewers and wells. A police diver is someone who craves a very particular type of challenge, and who has a deep drive for success against odds when looking for lost belongings, vehicles, weapons, bodies. 

It’s a person who is comfortable being claustrophobic, who likes working in the silence. And perhaps there's something calming about this – in our busy world, perhaps the quiet of the water is comforting. Perhaps the fact that a diver cannot see when in the water and has to do everything by touch, is also comforting, womb-like. They are in a submerged world, with only their heartbeats for company.

Not only did I want to explore the police diving but I wanted to really convey the feeling of being underwater, the delight of it, and the danger. I read books about individual relationships with water (The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka), articles from members of wild swimming communities, and nature books about what water tasted like in rivers, and what vegetation grew along the river banks. It was brilliantly immersive. So much so, that I've found myself writing my new book set against the backdrop of a Scottish Loch. More on that to come..

Silent Waters by L V Matthews (Welbeck Publishing Group) Out Now

Is blood thicker than water? At five a.m. one summer's morning, police diver Jen Harper wakes to find herself submerged in the silt of a river with no memory of how she got there. Forty-eight hours later, she's called to dive in the same river in search of a missing woman, Claudia Franklin. But for Jen, this is no ordinary job. Her and Claudia's families were entangled for decades - there is unresolved resentment between them, unspoken secrets. Jen hasn't seen Claudia for twelve years now. Or has she? 

A.A. Chaudhuri on the Fascination of Secrets and Lies between Friends and Family

As a psychological thriller writer, I love delving into the mindsets and motivations of my characters - what makes them tick and do the things they do - while setting this against everyday set-ups we can all relate to, as readers. Whether that be the workplace, on holiday, a marriage, or indeed in the context of a family or friendship scenario. It’s this close to the bone feeling that makes the genre so compelling for me, because we can all picture ourselves in a given situation, while the darker traits of human nature psychological thrillers tend to explore are all ones that we have the potential to fall foul of, as fallible human beings. Secrets and lies are a good example of this. At some point in our lives, all of us will have held a secret or told a lie, however big or small. It’s human nature. Secrets and lies permeate every level of society and in thrillers they tend to relate to something bad or unsavoury because of course this is what thriller fiction is about. It would be very bland and dull otherwise! Readers want to be intrigued, to feel on edge, to feel the tension, conflict and sense of dread and unease between characters as they turn the pages, so what better than a juicy secret to achieve this and keep them gripped? And when such secrets and lies exist between family and friends it can ramp up that intrigue and suspense we want from our thrillers that much more because we, as readers, know the ultimate reveal and impact is going to be huge and potentially very destructive. 

In my latest psychological thriller, The Final Party, three couples gather in a luxury villa high in the hills above the glamorous town of Sorrento for the seemingly perfect fortieth birthday celebration. But their idyllic week in paradise rapidly descends into the holiday from hell when one of the group starts receiving anonymous text messages threatening to expose a dark secret from their university days, and before long one of them is dead. 

But it is not just the fear of one secret from nearly two decades ago being exposed that is haunting my characters. Each of them is plagued by their own individual secrets which is driving a wedge between them, leading to the mind games and sense of mutual mistrust and unease which typifies the psychological thriller genre. As the plot unfolds the reader is gradually let into such secrets while the characters continue to keep them from each other. The continuing suspense for the reader lies in wondering when such secrets will be found out and what the fall-out will be when that happens. 

But what makes secrets and lies between friends and family so compelling for readers? For me, the answer to that questions lies in the fact that families and friends are our support systems, the people who we trust completely, and who we rely on to be honest with us and have our backs. That being said, when they lie to us and keep potentially harmful secrets from us, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, while the guilt and shame of the person at fault can take its toll and lead to the gradual erosion of such relationships along with escalating feelings of suspicion between them. There is a famous William Blake saying which I feel encapsulates this perfectly: ‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.’ What he of course meant by this is that we all expect our enemies to lie to us, but it’s the last thing we expect from our nearest and dearest, and so the potential for us to react in a rash or explosive way is that much greater. 

Guilt and fear are feelings that tend to feature heavily in psychological thrillers, and often stem from a character holding a dark secret they are at pains to keep buried because they fear the consequences of it being exposed, and yet at the same time the guilt and shame they feel for deceiving their loved ones almost destroys them. I think most people can empathise with this. It’s very rare for a person not to feel conflicting emotions of fear and guilt, unless they are a sociopath of course! Again, this is what makes the psychological thriller so relatable and therefore compelling.

Of course, just because a given character has a secret they are tormented by this doesn’t necessarily make them the ultimate culprit in the overall story, but what it does do is give them more complexity and depth as a human being, which I think readers appreciate because we all have light and shade to us, and it’s important to show a character’s redeeming side. It also serves as an effective red herring, particularly in multiple person narratives where the reader is privy to various characters’ secrets and lies, all of them with the potential to be the ultimate culprit in the overall story, and so keeps them guessing until the hopefully explosive denouement. 

It's human nature to be intrigued by secrets and lies when they aren’t your own, especially when they exist between friends and family because the potential outcome is that much more destructive. It’s a theme I’m sure will continue to hold infinite appeal for psychological thriller lovers far and wide until the end of time.

The Final Party by AA Chaudhuri. (Hera Books) Out Now

Six friends. In a luxury villa set high in the hills above the glamorous town of Sorrento, southern Italy, three couples gather for the perfect 40th birthday celebration. One body. Before the week is out, one of them is dead. Countless lies. Their perfect reunion quickly becomes the holiday from hell when one of the group starts receiving anonymous messages, threatening to expose a dark secret from their university days.  As old friendships are tested to the limit, it's clear that what happens in the dark past won't stay buried...

More information about A A Chaudhuri and her books can be ffound on her website. She can also be found on Twitter @AAChudhuri, Facebook. Instagram @a.a.chaudhuri

Behind Closed Doors by Nicole Trope

 

I live in a quiet street lined with Liquid Amber trees that signal the changing of the seasons by cloaking themselves in red and gold. There is a primary school in my street and each morning, children stream past my house, chattering to whoever is walking with them or they run ahead, young enough to still consider school a novelty. ‘Watch out for cars,’ a mother or father will call.

Once they’re safely inside school, the street clears and the cockatoos call to each other, their cries only disturbed by the sound of lawnmowers and the occasional passing car. It’s a peaceful street. 

Five houses away from my own home, there is a small neat house. It never really drew my attention although I did wonder why sheets covered the windows instead of curtains. The cars parked in the driveway were old, a bit battered but nothing that would make me suspicious. I assumed that the people inside were renting the home and that’s why they hadn’t splurged on curtains. The right garbage bins were taken to the curb on the right days and no noise every drifted up to my house late at night. The garden at the front of the house is neat and tidy, the grass cut short. I like the stone pathway leading to the front door.

I never heard anything about the house from any of the other neighbours. I never knew the occupants of the house but that’s not unusual. I know most of the neighbours to nod ‘hello’ to but chat to only a few-usually those with dogs. 

The house was never even on my radar until a few months ago. On a Thursday night I left my quiet street to pick my son up from his taekwondo class and retuned to see a police car in our street. It was angled out into the road, as though there had not been enough time to park properly; it’s blue and red lights whirring. I slowed my car and my son and I watched as a constable got out of the car, donned a yellow vest and hurried into the house. 

We had never seen something like that happen, except on television or in movies. The police don’t come to my street.

We were intrigued. The next morning, I took the dog for a walk at around 7am and parked outside the house was a police van, it’s door open and inside, a constable playing on his phone. He nodded and smiled at me.

Half an hour later when I went to drop my son off at school, the van was still there. It stayed there all day. I desperately wanted to know what was happening but didn’t feel I could ask. Everyone in the street must have felt the same way but we all remained in our houses, keeping our questions to ourselves.

That afternoon, after school, my son walked the dog past the police van and found the courage to ask what we all wanted to know. ‘They were growing weed,’ he was told. In a small house on a quiet street where children go to school-marijuana was being grown. It’s still illegal in Australia. 

No one could believe it. The police van remained outside for two days and then the house was shut up, the cars eventually towed from the driveway and left on the road. I pass the house every day and always wish I had the courage to creep up to the windows and peer through the gaps in the now drooping sheets that cover the windows. No one in the neighbourhood suspected a thing. 

The idea that in my own street, something like that was taking place fascinated me. And it made me wonder what else was going on inside the houses in my quiet street where the most exciting thing that usually happens is my dog running away. Sometimes a yelling parent is heard, sometimes a door is slammed with force but there has never been a reason for me to knock on a neighbour’s door, to ask, ‘is everything okay here?’

The Family Across The Street is a novel that takes place on a quiet street in a lovely neighbourhood. The lawns are all manicured and the back gardens large. Most of the houses have pools, some even have a tennis courts but inside one of the homes on this lovely street, a woman is terrified for her children’s lives. 

The novel begins with a delivery man named Logan attempting to drop off a computer for Katherine West. The computer needs to be signed for or it cannot be delivered. But Katherine won’t open the door. She answers the door but insists she cannot open it. ‘I can’t open the door,’ she repeats. ‘Please just leave the box...Please understand.’

Any other delivery driver would leave the house and get on with his or her day. They would not think about Katherine West again. But Logan is a man with a past, someone who’s had to rely on his instincts to stay alive and he hears something in the woman ‘s voice. And he knows she’s in danger.

The Family Across The Street takes place over one single day. One single life changing day. 

On my street, the weed house as we now call it, remains empty, the sheets sagging at the windows, the garbage bins lined up by the garage door. The lawn out front is still mowed and the garden still looks fine but now we know that behind those closed doors, something very different was happening. 

The Family Across The Street is a book that explores the truth behind nice front doors and neat gardens. And it’s a very frightening truth indeed.

The Family Across The Street by Nicole Trope (Published by Bookouture) Out Now

In a normal family, in a normal house, on a normal street, everything is about to go horribly wrong… You’d never know what secrets the house on Hogarth Street holds – what’s happening, right this second, behind closed doors. An emerald-green front lawn. Perfectly trimmed hedging. An ivy-covered front gate and the scent of honeysuckle in the air. In the yard, two scooters lie on the grass. One blue, one pink, belonging to five-year-old twins. But if you look closely, you’ll see the windows closed on the hottest day of the year. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the sound of a mother reassuring her precious children, the son and daughter she’d do anything for, as she holds their little hands. It’s OK, Mama’s here. If you manage to get past the locked doors, you’d find her blaming herself. For the mistakes she has made. The choices that have to led to this moment. Her regrets about trusting the wrong people. Inside the beautiful house on a quiet street is a mother making a desperate decision. Because somebody is threatening the life she has built and the children she worships. It’s down to her to protect her family. How far she is willing to go?

You can find her on Twitter @nicoletrope and you can also find her on Facebook.

Anna Bailey on writing Tall Bones

 When I was 23, I found myself living in a small town in rural Colorado. I worked at a Starbucks just off the highway, where you could see the mountains from every window and where truckers would come through early in the morning and tell me stories about Timberwolves and car wrecks. One morning, while I was walking to work in the dark, I met a coyote in the road, chewing on some shapeless piece of roadkill. We stared at one another. His muzzle was red and glistening and I could feel my own blood rushing in my ears. Am I going to die on the way to Starbucks? I thought. Jesus Christ, that sounded tragic. But then his big ears pricked up and he trotted away into the undergrowth, and that was how it was out there. Frightening and beautiful all at once.

My debut novel Tall Bones also takes place in the Colorado Rockies, and I wanted to imbue it with as much of that fear and wild beauty as possible. In the book, the Tall Bones are a stone circle on the edge of this remote mountain town, and it’s where the local kids go to drink beer and blow off steam and escape their oppressive home lives. One night, seventeen-year-old Emma, sees her best friend Abigail disappear into the woods that surround this stone circle, and the rest of the book follows Emma’s increasingly desperate search for her. But in trying to figure what happened, Emma unearths this small town’s secrets – the violence, prejudice, and religious control – and in the end, nobody is left unscathed.

This was a book that I wrote during quite a difficult time in my life. I was struggling to come to terms with my sexuality and I moved to America hoping to find space for myself. The landscapes there are some of the most evocative and overwhelming that I have ever experienced, and I certainly had space, living in the brutal beauty of the Rockies, but that vastness cuts you off from the world too, which is very much how the characters in this novel feel. Emma and Abigail are also trying to discover themselves as they come of age, but they’re restricted by their deeply conservative town with its extreme religious undertones.

My own experience of Christianity had a major influence on Tall Bones as well. Frankly, I’d never given God much thought, but in rural America, religion went hand in hand with the landscape. I often felt like the Rockies’ rough, snow-buried peaks were trying to push civilisation out. And so these places created hard people who looked after their own first and filled the huge spaces with whatever they had in common that could tie them together. This usually meant God. If I wanted to be accepted here, I would have to observe the rituals of church and self-loathing, the latter of which came easily enough being gay in a community that openly labelled homosexuals as an abomination. It became hard to ignore God. His supposed hatred of me was so strong, I thought I could feel Him behind every rock and tree, watching me and knowing that I didn’t belong there, and when I eventually extricated myself, I was so angry that anybody had made me feel like that, I knew I wanted to write something about this.

Hidden away from consequence, deep in the mountains, the town in Tall Bones is also heavily governed by Christianity. The local pastor knows how to use people’s shame to keep them in line, and this creates an atmosphere of secrecy and dread, so that when Abigail goes missing, nobody wants the police poking around in case any of their own secrets are dragged into the light in the process. But Emma, with her mixed-race heritage and turbulent past, has already been deemed an outsider by the community. She believes somebody knows what happened to Abigail, and with nothing left to lose, she is determined to expose them.

Writing this book, I was channelling all my awe of great wild landscapes as well as the fear of what they can hide; amongst all this, I was trying to find myself, and Tall Bones is what emerged. It’s a dark story, yes, but it’s a love story too. I think that’s something those small-town preachers often overlooked – that you can hate as fiercely as you want, but things are made to endure in the world’s hard places, and so are people. That’s what I hope readers will take away from this book.

Tall Bones by Anna Bailey (Published by Transworld Publishers Ltd) Out Now

When seventeen-year-old Emma leaves her best friend Abi at a party in the woods, she believes, like most girls her age, that their lives are just beginning. Many things will happen that night, but Emma will never see her friend again. Abi's disappearance cracks open the facade of the small town of Whistling Ridge, its intimate history of long-held grudges and resentment. Even within Abi's family, there are questions to be asked - of Noah, the older brother whom Abi betrayed, of Jude, the shining younger sibling who hides his battle scars, of Dolly, her mother and Samuel, her father - both in thrall to the fire and brimstone preacher who holds the entire town in his grasp. Then there is Rat, the outsider, whose presence in the town both unsettles and excites those around him. Anything could happen in Whistling Ridge, this tinder box of small-town rage, and all it will take is just one spark - the truth of what really happened that night out at the Tall Bones....