The Omnibus Murder available on Kindle

The Omnibus Murder

London 1878: Tamar Fleet is proud of her job. She rides the London omnibuses, helping to prevent pilfering from the omnibus company. While the country is deeply divided about whether Britain should go to war with Russia, Tamar takes no interest in world affairs, but occupies herself with her work and her friends.

Then there is a murder on an omnibus and Tamar is drawn into events which may have their origins thousands of miles away. There is trouble for her friends and Tamar has to make decisions about duty and loyalty and face danger herself.

See more at Amazon.

Work in Progress

I'm currently working on a murder mystery set in Victorian London. I hope to publish it in the New Year.

From a research point of view, Victorian London is an excellent setting for a novel. There is so much  material available online. I've been able to do all the necessary research without stepping away from the computer. Pre-internet, it might have taken months or years to find this amount of information. And then one would have to photocopy it, or transcribe it by hand.

On the other hand, from a research point of view, Victorian London can be a bad choice of setting because there is so much material available online. There is always more research that can be done. This is true of course even when the subject is not Victorian London and whether one is talking about a fiction or non-fiction project. One can spend forever researching and never get around to writing anything. But it is much easier to procrastinate when the source material is a click of a mouse away at any time of day or night, rather than requiring a journey to a record office which is only open for limited hours.

It's also possible to become excessively bogged down in detail.  I work on the principle of 'if you can't find out, leave it out' and gloss over minor points if they aren't essential to the plot. The main thing in historical fiction, I think, is to be true to the time and place and the mindset of the people who lived in it, rather than obsessively trying to recreate the period by describing every little detail.

Even when I have been able to find out something, I sometimes ignore it! I've been able to discover the exact layout of a particular location I'm using for a key development of the plot. On referring back to it, having written the chapter, I've found that the action I've described doesn't quite fit the layout. I've decided that artistic licence is permitted here. My plot is  not affected one way or the other. The location no longer exists (although I have Google Earthed the place where it was, and I may go and visit it one day)  and it would have to be a very nitpicky reader who went to the trouble of tracking down the source I've used and comparing it with what I've written.

I also have a minor plot problem. I need a fairly minor incident to occupy my character away from the main storyline for a short time. I had an idea for this, but have decided it's good enough to develop into a story in its own right. So it's back to the planning stage on that one, and a bit more reading round the subject to see if anything inspires me.

"I am ready to meet my Maker."

"Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."

Today, 30th January, is the fiftieth anniversary of the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. His granddaughter Emma Soames remembers the occasion.





I watched it on television. There was the ceremonial that we do so well. The rousing singing of The Battle Hymn of the Republic in St Paul's.






But for me the most poignant moment was the crane drivers' salute as the launch Havengore pulled away from Tower Pier.

Past vs Present

I've been reading this blog, which is following the proposals for the redevelopment of part of Deptford. Deptford is a run down area of south east London which is certainly in need of regeneration.

However, the area which it is proposed to redevelop is historically significant. It is the site of the first Royal Dockyard which dates from the time of Henry VIII. It is also the site of Sayes Court, home of the diarist John Evelyn, and of his garden.

Those who object to the proposals argue that they do not give proper consideration to the historical importance of the area; that they risk damaging or destroying archaeological evidence;  that they do not allow for community access to and appreciation of some of the historically important aspects of the site.

Yet homes are needed, as is investment that will bring jobs to the area. How should these needs be balanced with the desire to preserve the past?

The question of past versus present can be asked elsewhere. How much should local authorities spend on archive services when services for children and the elderly may be facing cuts?

Should the owners of  historic buildings be restricted in what they can do with their properties?  Yes, it is desirable that that old buildings should be preserved whenever possible. Timber and brick are almost always more attractive than concrete.

(It would be even better if planning authorities took account of scale and context when deciding what to preserve.)  

Most houses have been altered over the years. Fireplaces and chimney stacks have replaced open hearths. Tiled roofs have replaced thatch. Extensions have been added, rooms knocked through or partitioned off or converted to different uses. New windows and doors have been fitted. Mains drainage, water, gas and electricity have been added.

Why should it be decided that at some arbitrary date in the twenty first century a building should stop evolving to meet the needs and wants of the people who live there?  

St Bartholomew's Day

24 August is St Bartholomew's Day.

It is the anniversary of the Battle of Sandwich, otherwise the Battle of St Bartholomew's Day, fought in the English Channel between the French and the English in 1217.

The English were led by Hubert de Burgh, who had sixteen or eighteen large ships and twenty smaller ones under his command.

The French fleet was probably twice the size of the English, but since it was carrying reinforcements and supplies for the invading force already in England, the ships were overloaded and not easily manoeuvred.

The French fleet was commanded by Eustace the Monk, a notorious pirate and mercenary who also dabbled in magic. Eustace made his fleet invisible to the English, so that it could slip past them and enter the Thames Estuary and proceed to London.

However, Stephen Crabbe, a Winchelsea man, was also a student of magic. Despite Eustace's enchantment, he could see the French ships. He leapt aboard Eustace’s ship and struck off his head, whereupon the French fleet became visible again.

A storm raised by the intervention of St Bartholomew scattered the French fleet and left the English unharmed.

More plausibly, it is suggested that when the two fleets came to close quarters the English threw barrels of powdered lime onto the decks of the French, blinding them. Then Eustace’s ship was captured and Stephen Crabbe did indeed behead him on the deck. About twenty French ships were captured, the remainder retreating to Calais.

The Chapel and Hospital of St Bartholomew were founded in Sandwich to commemorate the victory.

Bartholomew Fair was held at Smithfield, on the edge of the City of London, from 1133.

As well as cloth merchants and traders in other commodities from all over England and further afield, the Fair attracted ballad sellers, tumblers, gamblers, conjurers, quacks, cheapjacks, doxies, cozeners, coney catchers, cutpurses, pickpockets, rogues and vagabonds. Many travelled long distances to be at the Fair, providing a headache for local authorities.

The Fair was used as the setting of a play by Ben Jonson in 1614.

By the nineteenth century, fairs as centres of large scale trade were becoming obsolete as other methods of distribution developed. The respectable merchants no longer came and Bartholomew Fair became increasingly vulgar and riotous. The last Fair was held in 1854; it was abolished by the City authorities in 1855.

The proceeds of tolls from the Fair went to the Priory and Hospital of St Bartholomew, founded in 1123. The Priory was dissolved in 1539. The Hospital was refounded, endowed, and its administration given to the City of London, in 1547.

The churches of St Bartholomew the Great and St Bartholomew the Less survive from the medieval period, but otherwise the earliest surviving buildings of Barts Hospital date from the eighteenth century.

Barts has now amalgamated with other London hospitals, but continues to operate from its Smithfield site.

In fiction, it is best known for the fact that John Watson met Sherlock Holmes in a laboratory there.
　

To plan or not to plan?

Fiction writers are firmly divided into two schools of thought; the planners and the non-planners. The planners believe in having every detail of a novel worked out before they start writing, sometimes to the point of knowing exactly what will happen in every scene.

The non-planners literally make it up as they go along. Some crime writers do not even know who the villain will be when they begin writing. I'm definitely a non-planner, although perhaps not so extreme as some.

When I start writing I always know who my main characters are, what the main conflict of the story will be,  and have at least some idea of how it will be resolved. But I don't know exactly how the story will unfold.

Two things, however, are essential before I can start writing.

I have to get the main characters' names right. I once changed the name of my central character because I thought the name I'd initially chosen was over-used. It took me a while to get used to her new name, and with it her character developed differently from how I had originally imagined her.

In historical fiction, I have to know exactly when the novel is set. Historical fiction centred on particular events, or a real person's life,  is of course tied to specific dates. But if that isn't the case, how does a historical fiction writer decide exactly when a story should take place?

When I began a previous piece of work, I knew the story had to be set in the late eighteenth century,  because that was when conditions existed for the story I wanted to tell. I decided to set it specifically in the autumn and winter of 1792-93,  just before Britain went to war with Revolutionary France. The impending war heightened some of the tensions and conflicts within the story, and the autumn weather, combined with the physical setting, could be used to establish the mood.

I'm just in the very early stages of thinking about another piece of work. The inspiration came from a passage in a book published in 1879, but the story could be set a few years either side of that.

Since it's to be a crime story, set in London, I don't want to go as late as 1888, as I don't want to have to deal with (or ignore) the Whitechapel murders. I also don't want to overlap with the Sherlock Holmes canon; the first story,  A Study in Scarlet, was set in the early 1880s and published in 1887.

I also have the impression that the 1870s are less used as a setting for fiction than the 1880s, so the earlier decade might be a good choice.

The year and even the month will be important as technology, and the
geography of London, were changing rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1874 my character could have seen the demolition of Northumberland House, the last of the great noblemen's palaces which had once lined the Strand, followed by the construction of Northumberland Avenue.

From 1878 she might have seen a telephone in operation in London. The Royal Albert Dock was opened in 1880, the Circle Line was completed in 1884; in the years preceding my character could have seen them being constructed.

Quite possibly, as I research the period, I'll discover something that was happening in London at this time which I can use in my plot, which will determine the precise date the action takes place.

Poetic licence?

The London fog, caused by the smoke of thousands of coal fires, domestic and industrial, is a familiar feature in both historical fiction and fiction written before the Clean Air Act of 1956.

Adding fog is an easy way for a writer to create a mood of foreboding and danger. It’s an essential part of the scene in late Victorian London:

‘A dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement.

'The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light.’

But what about earlier times? Can the historical novelist realistically add fog to the scene in any era?

'...Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air…'

So said Wordsworth in September 1802. Could the air really have been as clear as he suggests?

Pugin and Rowlandson's illustration, just a few years later, shows a definite haze hanging over the east of the City, beyond St Paul‘s. (The bridge shown is Blackfriars.)



John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, published in 1661, describes a heavily polluted city:

‘The City of London resembles the face rather of Mount Ætna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli, or the Suburbs of Hell, than an Assembly of Rational Creatures, and the imperial seat of our incomparable Monarch. For when in all other places the Aer is most Serene and Pure, it is here Ecclipsed with such a Cloud of Sulphure, as the Sun itself, which gives day to all the World besides, is hardly able to penetrate and impart it here; and the weary Traveller, at many Miles distance, sooner smells, than sees the City to which he repairs.’

It’s suggested that there was an element of political allegory in Evelyn’s writing. Should it be taken literally? Probably. Wordsworth is the odd one out. While the air may indeed have been unusually clear that morning in September 1802, the sight he saw was probably not typical.  

A noble cupola -

- a forme of church-building not as yet known in England, but of wonderfull grace. 

So John Evelyn described the proposed design for the new St Paul's, to replace  the cathedral destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. It’s a building that every English person probably, and every Londoner certainly, should see at least once.

It’s not cheap to go in (£14.50 at time of writing), but there is a lot to see. It needs a whole afternoon to begin to do it justice.

To men accustomed to the Norman and Gothic styles, Wren’s design for St  Paul’s was revolutionary. His plan, with the great dome, was rejected in favour of something more familiar.

Wren reputedly achieved his masterpiece by erecting a high fence around the site, allowing no-one but himself to see the complete plans, and making alterations as building progressed, until the work was too far advanced to reverse them.

Despite the initial reservations about the design, the dome of St Paul’s has become an essential and iconic part of the London skyline.

The image of the cathedral surrounded by smoke and flames came to symbolise Londoners’ resistance during the Blitz of 1940-41.

Wellington and Nelson are probably the best known of those buried in St Paul‘s, but it is not only national heroes who are commemorated there. There are memorials to artists, musicians, newspapermen. In the north aisle are plaques commemorating the crew of HMS Captain, lost in 1870. In the crypt is a memorial to correspondents who covered the Sudanese campaigns of 1883, 1884 and 1885.

Christopher Wren is buried in his cathedral. His tomb is unobtrusive and easily overlooked. It does not matter. His epitaph, composed by his son, also Christopher, says all that is necessary:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice

Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

The London Underground is born

On this day, 10 January, in 1863, the Metropolitan Railway, the first part of the London Underground, and the world’s first underground railway, was opened to passenger traffic. The line (which is now part of the Hammersmith and City Line) ran for three and three quarter miles from Farringdon to Paddington.

‘Many prophets started with the positive assurance that it would be a failure; that it would never be commenced, or if commenced, never finished; that London would be undermined, blown up, or collapse on each side of the tunnelling.’

Nevertheless the work was completed, at a cost of around £1.5m, despite ‘immense difficulties, of shifting grounds, swelling clay, falling houses, bursting drains, and continued incursions of the Fleet Ditch.’

At least 25,000 people travelled on the line on its first day of operation. Such was the demand that at King’s Cross the sale of tickets to eastbound passengers was suspended for an hour or more around midday, as the trains coming from Paddington were full to capacity.

The intention was that the Metropolitan Railway would eventually link the London, Chatham & Dover (then under contsruction), the Great Western and the Great Northern railways.

‘It will afford a direct and expeditious means of conveyance for the enormous traffic between the east and west ends of London,’ said The Times. ‘If the traffic of our main thoroughfares continued to increase as it has done for the last few years locomotion would, without some relief, become impracticable…. The time has come when some means were absolutely required for removing a great part of the traffic entirely from the streets, and that great object will, we hope, be secured by the opening of the Metropolitan Railway.’

As well as reducing congestion on the roads, the Underground, and other forms of public transport, played an important part in easing overcrowding in inner London. Large numbers of people could now be moved quickly over long distances. Men and women no longer had to live within walking distance of their workplaces. The Tube, railways and electric trams stimulated suburban development, and the cheap ‘workman’s ticket’ brought suburban life, and healthier, less crowded living conditions within the reach of the less well off white collar workers and the skilled working classes.

To Prologue or not to Prologue?

Am I the only person who skips prologues in novels? I’ve never really understood what they were for. There’s usually nothing in them that’s essential to understanding the plot, and I just want to get on to the real beginning of the story.

Recently, though, I’ve been experimenting with adding a prologue to the novel I’m working on. There’s quite a bit of moving around between different time periods in this novel (though it isn’t time travel or time slip) and the prologue establishes characters that aren’t part of the main, contemporary, narrative. It also (I hope) creates a greater sense of drama and mystery than the first chapter, which is when the story begins for the main characters. But it still would be possible to follow the story without reading the prologue. I don’t know, I might end up taking it out again.

Among today’s birthdays - King Richard II, born 1367, and Gustave Doré, born 1832. Yes, Doré was French, but he’s relevant because of his illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, 1872. This is ‘Over London by Rail’. Search Google Images to see more.