The question I am asked most by readers is: where do I get my ideas from? And I say that ideas are all around. With Deadly Inheritance I know exactly where the first idea came from. I was reading a book on criminal investigation when I came across the statement: suicides don’t kill themselves lying down. It immediately stuck in my mind. One of the difficulties – and also delights - of writing historical crime novels is the question of technical and forensic knowledge at any particular time. But here was something that surely belonged to experience rather than science. I had been thinking around ideas for an historical crime novel set at the start of the twentieth century, after the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Boer War. It was a time of new beginnings, of excitement. Then I came across an exhibition at the American Museum just outside Bath, on the American heiresses who married into the English aristocracy towards the end of the nineteenth century and I knew such a setting could provide the sorts of tensions that lie behind a crime novel.
I didn’t, though, want my main character to be an heiress. But how about a resourceful, doughty American girl in her late twenties, with an adventurous background, employed to accompany the young sister of one of these heiresses to visit her sister, Helen the Countess of Mountstanton at the family estate. Belle, the sister, recently rescued from embryonic scandal, is hoping for an aristocratic husband of her own. Her companion, Ursula Grandison, has been tasked by Chauncy Seldon the millionaire father of the girls to discover what is going on in the marriage and what has happened to Helen’s dowry. I could see masses of ways the plot could work out but that phrase, suicides don’t kill themselves lying down, remained with me and it gave me an ending, Usually I start a book with a detailed plot worked out – except for the ending. I have published ten books in the cookery Darina Lisle crime series, three in the historical Canaletto series, and a stand alone To Kill The Past, and always the ending waits to be discovered until I’m there. For Deadly Inheritance this way of working was turned upside down.
As I started, I had an idea of some of the characters, the setting and, extraordinarily, an ending but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. It didn’t matter; I was having far too much fun getting into the mind of Ursula, my heroine; together we were discovering the dysfunctional Mountstanton household, its aristocratic background, the upstairs and the downstairs, the local community, the demands being made on Belle, the young sister, her passionate pursuit of the Earl’s secretary, the marriage difficulties of the Earl and Countess, the stresses imposed by the mother-in-law, the steely Dowager Countess. Ursula discovers the body of a nursemaid everyone believed had run off and the plot seemed to write itself. Characters suddenly turned up, such as the Earl’s brother, Charles, home from the Boer war, a practical man who Ursula is surprised to find herself attracted to. But he seems involved with fighting his brother and mother for justice for the nursemaid’s sad remains. And then along a private investigator, Thomas Jackman, and tragedy strikes again at Mountstanton and this time no cover up is possible. I have no idea where Jackman came from but the tricky relationship between him and Ursula as Charles instructed them to work together to sort out the two deaths seemed too interesting to abandon after the book ended.
So I’m now finishing a follow-up novel, A Fatal Freedom with Ursula in London and once again assisting Jackman in a murder investigation that features a militant member of the Votes for Women campaign. I have just found out how it ends!
Janet Laurence is the author of numerous books, including Deadly Inheritance. She was the Writer in Residence and Visiting Fellow at Jane Franklin College at the University of Tasmania in 2002 and has also run the Crime Writing Course at each of the Bristol-based CrimeFest conventions to date.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Deadly Inheritance
by Janet Laurence
Giveaway ends May 12, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.