Always questing

One of the great joys of being an author of historical fiction is that I can spend a whole day on research – running off down all sorts of rabbit-holes – and still claim to be “writing”.  Today I have had two quests, both of which remain unfulfilled, but then that’s part of the fun: if it was easy to find this stuff, everyone would do it.

Quest 1: where was the station house (i.e. home base) for Division E of the Metropolitan Police when they were first created in 1829?  Division E operates in Holborn, and candidates for their station house location are Bow Street (although this was initially the home of Division F), Hunter Street (but apparently not until later in the century), Hatton Garden (but this was actually a magistrates’ court – did they bunk up together?) and George Street (although I can find only one mention of any police presence there).  I have been on police history forums and emailed all sorts of people – and this is just so that Sam can make a passing comment to Martha. He may have to think of something else to say.

Quest 2: a cover illustration for “The Notes of Change” (the novel formerly known as “Plank 7”).  I have found the perfect image – but the man who drew it has died, and the man who published the book in which it appeared as died, and I’m struggling to find anyone who has the authority to grant permission to use the picture.  But I’ll have to persist, as can you imagine the outrage – the scandal, darlings – should I be charged with a copyright offence concerning the cover of a novel about law and order?

Like a pig in press

I am having just the most fun.  For some unknown reason (I guess I once showed an interest in the website) I have had an email from a newspaper archive service offering me a free three-day weekend pass to their records.  Three days of snooping around in old newspapers, especially given that I am library-starved during lockdown – yes please!  In short, you can put in any search term and time frame and the service rootles through its “20,200+ newspapers from the 1700s–2000s”.  It’s not comprehensive – sadly, there’s no sign of the “Cambridge Chronicle” that was published on Fridays in the 1820s and would have been useful for my new Cambridge-set series – but there’s certainly enough to keep me going.

I have written a long list of search terms, trying to think of anything that might be useful for “Plank 7” or the Cambridge series, while hoping that I don’t stumble across anything that contradicts something I have written in an earlier Sam book.  I have been clipping and saving like a demon, and have devised a new file-naming convention so that I can see at a glance which topic it covers (Crockford’s gambling club, Met Police, counterfeiting, university constables, etc.).  This has made me realise that the articles I had sourced before, in the good old days when I could go into a real-life archive, are named rather chaotically, so I need to go back through those and rename and reorganise them.  Don’t feel sorry for me for one single second: I’m in seventh heaven when I’m researching and organising.

I have also taken the opportunity to search for my own surname in the press; it’s unusual enough to accumulate only 393 matches between 1802 and today (and some of those are mis-readings of the words “grassy” and “grocery”).  I was hoping for something glamorous or scandalous or wealthy, but sadly the high point of the family’s achievements seems to be a W E Grossey triumphing after “close and spirited competition” to win the Church of Ireland Young Men’s Society Elocution Competition in 1891.

Back at last

Today I visited the Cambridge University Library – my spiritual home and happy place – for the first time since (I think) March.  It wasn’t the carefree immersion of old: I had to book my visit ahead of time and specify the maximum five books that I wanted them to leave on my allocated desk.  No wandering around the open stacks, no snooping around the special collections just to wallow in knowledge, no sniffing the air in the Rare Books Room.  But still, I was sitting in the vaulted Reading Room, with ten books at my elbow.  (Five book limit – pah!  Ask for something that comes in six volumes et voilà!)

I had planned to limit my research for “Plank 7” to the new things I intend to include – Crockford’s gambling club, and London’s sanitation system, for instance.  (Now you’re intrigued… And if you’d like to know more about that sanitation stuff, do sign up for my monthly research updates, as that’s my topic for the next one.)  But my perusing of the UL catalogue turned up a couple of publications on the history of policing that I had missed before and I couldn’t resist ordering them as well.  And I will admit that I opened them with trepidation.

As regular readers will know, I am a devil for historical accuracy.  It’s unfortunate, because I am both pedantic and unskilled as a historian.  But if it’s in my power to find it out, I will do so, and I will make sure that it is reflected accurately in the Sam books.  This means that I live in fear of discovering something new that makes my earlier writing inaccurate.  I don’t mind (much…) if my earlier writing has gaps in it, as I can fill those in as I go along, working them into plots of later books.  But if something is actually wrong – shudder!  Thankfully, today was a day for illumination rather than contradiction.  And my top three favourite facts I learned are:

• William Crockford – who owned London’s finest and most aspirational gambling club, which counted the (prudent and non-gambling) Duke of Wellington amongst its members – dressed like a poor country farmer and spoke with “rough cockney tones”
• The wine cellar below Crockford’s was 285 feet long, and contained 300,000 bottles valued at £70,000 in total [that’s about £4.8 million in today’s money]
• The new Metropolitan Police were given a recognisable uniform to wear partly to reassure the public that they were not government spies.

PhD by proxy

For many years I flirted with the idea of doing a PhD.  The academic world suits introverted swots like me, and I am a past master at concentration and at spending a long time learning a great deal about very little.  (Hence my quarter-century career in anti-money laundering; that’s one crime, folks, for twenty-five years.  You can’t call me flighty.)  I thought my area of study would be something to do with money laundering (I know: colour you surprised), but every department of criminology I spoke to said, well, of course there will need to be robust statistical underpinning to your research, and so I lost interest.  Statistics and I parted company by mutual consent shortly after my “O” level exams.

But the PhD has come back into my life in a big way in recent months.  As you know, I am currently knee-deep in research: first I was working on the Gregory series, and now I have returned to more familiar ground with the Sam series.  But things are changing for Sam and Wilson: the first patrol for the Metropolitan Police took to the streets at 6pm on Wednesday 30 September 1829.  There is an enormous amount to learn about the genesis of the Met and about its first few months of operations – I’m not complaining!  (Far from it: the words “lots of research” are catnip to me.)  And an unexpected source of terrifically detailed information has been PhD theses.

When I was researching the Gregory series, I knew pretty early on that I would need an educated man with whom Gregory – largely self-taught and endlessly curious (yes, yes, I know: so far, so Sam) – could discuss his cases and concerns.  (Like Conant and Harmer in the Sam series.) No-one at the University would be suitable (too political, too linked to a specific college, too snooty) and suddenly the idea of a coroner came to me.  In Gregory’s time it was a part-time role to which a man – usually a solicitor – would be elected for life.  And (joy of joys) I realised that I knew very little about coroners and would need to do lots of research.  One of the sources I turned up with a Google hunt was a PhD thesis on “Coroners in London and Middlesex, c. 1820–1888: A Study of Medicalization and Professionalization” by an Open University student called Yvonne Fisher.  Readers, the wealth of information!  The clear explanations!  The pages of references to sources for further research!

And so when one of my Met Police truffle hunts revealed another thesis – this one called “Criminal and Constable: The Impact of Policing Reform on Crime in Nineteenth Century London”, by Gregory Durston of the London School of Economics – I knew I was in for a treat.  Mr Durston and I have been together for two days now and my understanding of the early days of the Met has increased immeasurably.

So if you’re doing research, don’t discount those unpromising-looking PDF file links you find: they might look dry and dusty, they might be clunky scans of paper documents, but they are gold dust. Imagine: someone has spent three years or more distilling and digesting all that information, and we get to swoop in and reap the benefit.  We’re the top-level carnivores of the research world – yum yum!  (And here’s a site to get you started, with links to more than five million theses and dissertations.)

A Big Decision

I have some big news.  I know that back in the day (August last year) I asked your opinion on which book I should write next: the final Sam Plank book or the first Gregory Hardiman book.  Votes were fairly even, but in the end I decided to let Sam rest for a while and to embark on a new relationship with Gregory.  Since then, I have tried – I really have.  I have immersed myself in research into Cambridge and the University [everyone capitalised it in the 1820s] and the university constables.  I have worked out who Gregory is and where he comes from and how he reaches Cambridge, and what happened to him in Spain [spoiler: it’s not pretty].  But I just cannot get going with the writing; even with twelve weeks (and counting…) of lock-down, I’ve managed only about 5,000 words.  And after listening to one of Joanne Harris’s excellent Youtube tutorials, in which she talked about putting projects aside for when their time is right, I have come to a conclusion: I’m reversing my decision.  In other words, I’m going to do “Sam 7” before “Gregory 1”.  (Not instead of “Gregory 1”: I have done enough research to know that I really do want to do the Cambridge series, but just not right now.)

Before coming to this decision I had to make sure that I hadn’t hamstrung myself with “Fatal Forgery”.  You may remember that I did not plan a Sam series: it happened because once I had finished “FF” – which was intended as a standalone book – I just couldn’t bear to say goodbye to Sam.  But did I say anything in “FF” that would make it tricky to write the final Sam book, which sees the advent of the Metropolitan Police and a significant change in Sam’s working life?  With trembling hands I opened my copy and found this: “I continued working as a constable for the magistrates in Great Marlborough Street, and when the policing of London was reorganised in the summer of 1829 I was one of the first to transfer to the new Metropolitan Police Force.  I could have stayed with the magistrates, but I had a deal of respect for the two new Commissioners of Police, and London had grown so vast and so wild that I agreed with their view that the city was now sorely in need of an integrated police force.  With my years of experience, I was quickly put to work training new recruits.”  I then revisited “Heir Apparent” – the most recent Sam book – and at the end of that Wilson talks about joining the new force and encourages Sam to think about signing up to help train the new recruits.  Who would have guessed it!

I am so excited at the thought of being able to wade once more into the history of policing – Gregory is a university constable, which is not the same.  As for an actual plot, I’m quite taken with counterfeiting, coining (that’s the counterfeiting of money) and gambling.  I’m thinking of publication in October 2021.  And before you can ask, yes, there will be MORE MARTHA!

Thinking back and planning ahead

I was doing my usual Sam stint over the weekend (aiming for 2,000 words, managed 2,103, thank you for asking) when two new ideas came to me about existing characters.  I can’t tell you what they are, as they are crucial plot developments, but they forced me to take time out from the writing to consider Big Plot Questions.  Both developments, you see, will affect not only “Plank 3” but also the next four books in the series.

Regular readers will remember that I am planning a series of seven Plank books – one published each year, and each one set in a consecutive Regency year (“Fatal Forgery” in 1824, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” in 1825, “Plank 3” in 1826, etc.) until 1830.  This seems like a good end point because (a) we’re about to go Victorian, and what the world does not need is another series of Victorian crime novels, (b) Sam’s job changes significantly in 1829, when the Metropolitan Police is formed in London, and (c) he’s getting on a bit and would be thinking (or at least Martha would be thinking) about a quieter life than chasing scoundrels and scum around the streets of the capital.

Exciting though a series is, it does mean that I have to think more carefully about any plot twists that I might introduce on a whim.  For instance (and let me say at the outset that this is absolutely NOT happening), if Martha suddenly decides to become a milkmaid in Vauxhall pleasure gardens, Sam and I will have to deal with the consequences of that not just for “Plank 3” but for four more years as well.  So everything that my characters do or say in “Plank 3” has to fit in with everything they have already done and said in “Fatal Forgery” and “Canary” AND with everything I might want them to do or say in “Planks 4 to 7”.  I may need to lie down in a darkened room.

(And for those of you who are wondering just how long we’re going to continue with this “Plank 3” nonsense, please rest assured that I am homing in on my shortlist of five possible titles which, as with “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, I will put to the public vote on this blog, in July.  So get ready to have your say.)