For my new series of historical mystery novels I chose 1903, the start of the twentieth century. Queen Victoria was no more, the Prince of Pleasure, Edward VII, was on the throne, the Boer War had ended, and industry was constantly changing ordinary lives: the telephone, the motor car, the underground railway, electricity. All these were being developed in ways that affected almost everyone. A comparison could perhaps be made with the internet, the mobile telephone and the i-Pad in our contemporary lives.
I think if Dickens had been alive today, he would have headed the crime best seller list. He specialised in focusing on the character failings which so often are at the heart of murder and other crimes and the massive changes that fuelled the pulsating heart of the huge city that was London. But crime novels can be successfully set in small, constricted communities where flaws in relationships can fester and grow in ways that may lead to explosive situations.
For the first in my new series I was captivated by the idea of a story set, not in tumultuous London but in the country, in a large, aristocratic household, involving both upstairs and downstairs. When I started writing, I had no idea that Downton Abbey was in the making, a TV series supplied not only with a stately home at the start of the twentieth century but also, like my story, with an American heiress! The idea of a huge stately home, with an inherited tradition that could constrict worse than a whalebone corset, immense maintenance costs, and a staff that would be enough today to run a supermarket store, I found supremely enticing. And what about the primogeniture that ensured title, estate and monies were passed to the eldest son, with a tradition of professions for the junior ones to follow? What tensions must have existed in such a family and its establishment! But I didn’t want my heroine to be the heiress who had traded her fortune for a title, instead she was to be an American girl but one who was broke but resourceful.
The aristocratic stately home was only one tiny segment of English life at that time. As I came to the end of writing Deadly Inheritance this, I knew that in Ursula Grandison, my broke American girl, I had a heroine who could face the challenge of supporting herself with no connections or qualifications in London. A challenge that would obviously involve the position of single women at the start of the twentieth century, the legal constraints faced by married women, and the fight for equality, a fight that would include campaigning for the vote. The private investigator who had appeared in the first book would play a part; working together informally, he and my heroine would solve more murders. Now A Fatal Freedom is nearly finished and I’m enjoying looking at ideas for Ursula Grandison’s next challenge.
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.