Peter Lovesey on the rise of the historical mystery novel

Mystery readers watch out. Your favourite bookshops are under seige by ancient Egyptians, conquering Romans, mediaeval monks, cloaked Elizabethans and crinolined Victorians. The rise and rise of the historical mystery has been the dominant trend of the last thirty years. Authors like Ellis Peters, Anne Perry and Lindsey Davis achieved bestselling status. Other high profile writers better known for their modern settings — I’m thinking of Ed McBain, Michael Crichton, John Gardner, Colin Dexter and Ken Follett – could not ignore the trend and produced their own history mysteries.

In the days when there were fewer of them I wrote eight Victorian mysteries between 1970 and 1978 and I am often asked what inspired them. The answer is simple: the lure of money. In 1969 I saw an advert for a crime novel competition with a first prize of a thousand pounds, which was about as much as I was earning as a teacher. The script had to be delivered in a little over four months. Not much time for research and plotting. I’d already published a non-fiction book on the history of athletics, so it seemed sensible to write about something I’d already mugged up, a long distance running race in 1878. Tossing in a couple of murders, some steamy sex and Scotland Yard’s finest, I concocted a whodunnit that was different, if nothing else. The title, Wobble to Death, was catchy, and it won the prize.

In the next seven years I wrote a series using Victorian enthusiasms as backgrounds: prizefighting, the music hall, the seaside, inventions, spiritualism, boating and the waxworks. They were dramatised for the TV series Cribb in 1980 and, together with my wife Jax, I wrote six additional TV scripts using the same characters, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. I was in serious danger of being pigeon-holed as a history mystery man and nothing else. I started plotting my escape, writing books set rather later in the twentieth century. I suppose they qualified as period pieces, if not what most of us think of as history. One called On the Edge was set in 1946, well within my memory. It took me twenty-one years to break out completely and write my first contemporary crime novel, The Last Detective (1991).

So what is the appeal of the historical mystery? I doubt if I’m qualified to judge. I enjoy writing them, but I don’t read many. I’ve heard it suggested that readers like to escape into the past when so much about the present is depressing. That may be so, but it isn’t obvious to me when I write them. I find I’m more intrigued by things that haven’t changed. It’s amusing to discover that human nature hasn’t altered in thousands of years. The little vanities and the bigger enmities are much the same whether the characters are living in caves or travelling through space.

Take many of today’s hot political topics and you find that people in the past were having to deal with similar problems in their own way. As I write this, the headlines are dominated by drug use in sport. In Wobble to Death, the athletes were taking drugs to improve their performance. The motives were the same, even if the chemistry was different. They pepped up their performance with strychnine; the modern athlete takes something called TGH.

The wider use of drugs in society is not a modern phenomenon. Victorians had their opium dens which were thought iniquitous by respectable people – who took chloral and laudanum as sedatives. The Queen herself was said to have been a cocaine freak, addicted to Marioli’s Cocoa Wine, in which pure coca was the main ingredient.

What else are our newspapers preoccupied with? Terrorism? The Fenian campaign of the 1880s (the basis of Invitation to a Dynamite Party) was quite as serious and scary as the IRA attacks more than a century later. The Fenians succeeded in bombing Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, the Tower of London, Westminster Hall, the Admiralty and Victoria Station.

Another hot topic of today is immigration. Accounts of Irish immigrants being dumped on the English and Welsh coasts by shipmasters after the failure of the potato crops in 1845 and 1846 have a strikingly modern ring to them. And any student of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 will confirm that the East End teemed with East European immigrants.

Royal scandals? I got to know Bertie, the fun-loving Prince of Wales, quite well when writing three novels based on the assumption that he would have made a not very competent, but unstoppable detective. Bertie’s situation, wanting responsibility and a hand in the affairs of state, yet compelled to wait, appealed to me. There are parallels with modern royalty that I need not labour here.

One of the delights of weaving history into the mystery is that trivia found in memoirs and biographies can be used to bring colour to the characters and their motives. I like the story of Bertie’s brother, Prince Leopold, having such a crush on Lillie Langtry — the Jerry Hall of her day — that he bought a portrait of her by Frank Miles and hung it over his bed. Queen Victoria spied the drawing and was so scandalised that she climbed on a chair and removed it. I read somewhere else that Victoria in old age achieved the perfect symmetry of fifty-eight inches both in height and waistline. Climbing that chair couldn’t have been easy.

I hope I’ve written enough modern mysteries to ensure that my publishers won’t get more enquiries like the one from a Mrs Robinson in 1981:

Dear Mr Lovesey,

I have read two or three of your Victorian detective stories about Sergeant Cribb with immense pleasure, but I have not written to thank you because I assumed that you died many years ago. My husband Frank says he thinks you may still be alive. We had quite an argument about it in bed last night. I suppose it does not really matter, but we would be very pleased to have this question cleared up.

Yours sincerely etc.

PS Just in case, I enclose a stamped addressed envelope.

Crime Writer Peter Lovesey on setting stories close to home

‘We’re talking body parts. Some leg bones, a ribcage and a piece of an arm. The River Wylye, near Warminster.’

‘That’s Wiltshire.’

‘It’s only a half-hour drive.’

‘It’s not our patch.’

‘With respect, sir, killers don’t work to county borders like us.’

This extract from The Vault illustrates a modern crime writer’s dilemma. Readers enjoy stories set in real places. Part of the strength of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels or Ian Rankin’s Rebus series is that Oxford and Edinburgh are so strongly evoked that they make the stories more believable. There is a downside, however, and that is that by blurring fact and fiction the writer risks upsetting the locals. If those body parts had been discovered in some recognizable spot the people who lived there would be (I was about to write ‘up in arms’ but I’ll rephrase it) understandably upset. They might even phone their lawyers.

I lived in Upper Westwood for almost twenty years, and wrote most of my books there. This corner of Wiltshire, above the spectacular Limpley Stoke Valley, yet riddled with subterranean quarries, would stimulate any writer’s imagination. For a number of years I resisted. My first books were set in Victorian London. I was fortunate in getting a TV series for Cribb, the detective sergeant played with wonderful subtlety by Alan Dobie. But I wanted to write a contemporary series and it seemed obvious to create a detective closer to home. He became Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath Police.

Bath was only seven miles from Westwood, and I combined sight-seeing with shopping and called it research. The Last Detective established Diamond in the real police station in Manvers Street and venturing as far west as Chew Valley Lake. These settings made a nice change from the fog-enshrouded streets of Victorian London, but I learned early that if I fixed a real location for a murder I had to be discreet. It wouldn’t do to pick someone’s house and say which number of the street it was. I was constantly reining back my desire to give the total picture.

I didn’t stray into Wiltshire until the third book in the series, The Summons, when Diamond’s sleuthing takes him to Conkwell Woods, to an imagined ‘state-of-the-art recording studio in the wilds of Wiltshire’ in search of information about a murdered Swedish girl. The story reaches its climax in a village with a church where ‘knobbly pinnacles in profusion compensate for the lack of a steeple, removed by a storm in 1670’ — Steeple Ashton. It was ‘the most civilised arrest in the combined experience of all the detectives’, but you must read the book to find out why.

Following the principle that if the crimes originated in Diamond’s area, he could still roam widely to clear them up, I set my locked room mystery Bloodhounds partly on a padlocked canal boat at the Dundas boatyard and partly at Lucknam Park, that plush hotel near Colerne. My daughter Kathy’s wedding reception had been held there and as father of the bride I’d been a regular visitor making arrangements. It was a gorgeous wedding, so I refrained from sullying a good memory by discovering corpses on the premises.

Nearer home, in Upon a Dark Night, one of the characters is a former mayor of Bradford on Avon who has a silver figurehead mounted on his white Bentley, a replica of the gudgeon located above the medieval lock-up that enables the unfortunate prisoner to be ‘under the fish and over the water’. Details like this are fun to weave into a story.

In The Vault, I had Diamond in a mystery involving Frankenstein. I’d read that Mary Shelley wrote much of her famous horror story in a house almost touching Bath Abbey, it was so close. The building was demolished in Victorian times, but I speculated that its basement remained and bones are discovered there. Later Diamond is required to visit the hamlet of Stowford and – just as I did in the interest of research – enjoyed a cream tea in a fifteenth century farmhouse. How we writers suffer for our art.

Naming a real setting was out of the question in The Reaper, a black comedy in which the rector of a Wiltshire village is accused by the bishop of embezzling the church funds and picks up a heavy glass paperweight of St Paul’s and … I’d better not say more. You won’t find Foxford on any map any more than Marcus Glastonbury was a real bishop or Otis Joy a real clergyman. But one thing is true: I’ve had letters from vicars and rectors saying they enjoyed it.

One evening the Bradford on Avon Arts Society had a talk by a remarkable speaker and writer, Joan Moules, who introduced me to the Warminster Writers’ Circle. That putdown ‘You need to get out more’ applies to me and I did with these friends, some published, some just beginners. Out of that has come another book. A writers’ circle is a perfect group of suspects, especially when a publisher promises much and lets them down. After The Circle, appeared in the bookshops I wondered if I would dare set foot in Warminster again, but they were totally forgiving.