Most of my novels are historical, and they include ten books set on the railways of the early 20th Century featuring Jim Stringer, a railway policeman. I am romantically drawn to that period: no mobile phones, no fluorescent light or man-made fibres – and plenty of smoke and steam available for atmospheric effects. If you really did travel back in time, you would think you were hallucinating, so I take a visual approach, providing a series of images that I hope are historically accurate whilst also having the force and originality of dream scenes. It seems to me that the writers on my list take a similar approach.
Dickens was born in 1812 and Barnaby Rudge is set in 1775 and 1780, the year of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London. But the fascinating thing about the book is that much of the London Charles Dickens specialized in describing did not yet exist at the time. As the narration has it, "Nature was not so far removed, or hard to get at," and the book is intensely bucolic in a woozy way. See, for example, the description of a central location of the book, The Maypole Inn: "With its overhanging stories, drowsy little panes of glass, and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway, the old house looked as though it were nodding in its sleep." Dickens had a deep affection for the century before his own; he evokes it brilliantly here.
'One of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels' Peter Ackroyd
Set against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudge is a story of mystery and suspense which begins with an unsolved double murder and goes on to involve conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and retribution. Through the course of the novel fathers and sons become opposed, apprentices plot against their masters and anti-Catholic mobs rampage through the streets. With its dramatic descriptions of public violence and private horror, its strange secrets and ghostly doublings, Barnaby Rudge is a powerful, disturbing blend of historical realism and Gothic melodrama.
Hawksmoor is a tale of murder and ghostly happenings in some London churches. It’s set partly in the modern-day (or 1985, when it was published) and partly in the early 18th Century. The 18th Century language – making full use of the randomized capitalization favoured at the time – is amazingly vivid: "Mr. Vanbrugghe…blew into my Closet like a dry leaf in a Hurricanoe." Indeed, the modern-day scenes are deliberately slightly pallid in comparison with Ackroyd’s fever dream of the past. I have read this book three times, and it remains mysterious to me – which I mean as a compliment.
'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe'
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . .…
For comfort reading, I like period children’s stories, as written by, say, E.Nesbit, Noel Streatfield, Richmal Crompton. Childhood seems to have been more fun when it came up against the constraints of an adult society more formal than our own. Gillian Avery’s achievement was to write spirited historical children’s stories that have all the social nuance you would find in the above authors. The Greatest Gresham (written in 1962, set in the 1890s) is about the timid children of one family who are brought out of their shells by the bolder kids next door, and it all feels just right. For instance, when the mother of the timid children is out on her ‘calling’ (or visiting) day, they always have tea with the family maids, one of whom habitually reads their fortune in their tea leaves.
The Go-Between is a haunting, doom-laden book about a naïve boy – Leo – out of his depth when staying with a socially smarter friend in a British country house. It’s set in the heatwave summer of 1911 and made such a big impression on me that I wrote a novel of my own set in that summer. The first line of The Go-Between is famous: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Cue the dissolve into an Edwardian dreamworld that slowly turns nightmarish.
L.P. Hartley's moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.
'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The…
The back cover of the edition I own states, "Through the hostile landscape of the Texas-Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood." The story is set in the mid-19th Century, and it is a Western, albeit one that makes almost any other Western seem as amiable as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This is a very violent book, but also a very sensual one. You are always right there. I could quote almost any sentence from the book to prove this, but here’s one: "They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane."
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
This - the first in the series of ten novels featuring railwayman Jim Stringer - is set in 1903. Jim, an unworldly young man who aspires to be an engine driver, is lured from Yorkshire to London, to work on the London & South Western Railway. After moving into a lodging house amid the viaducts around Waterloo Station, he finds himself working on the ‘half link’. This is the roster of men who operate the trains carrying corpses and mourners to the huge Brookwood Cemetery, forty miles outside London, and all his colleagues seem to be harbouring a secret, possibly relating to the mysterious fate of Jim’s direct predecessor as the junior man on the Necropolis run...
As an American widow flush with cash, she has hopes of finding the burning, passionate love she never experienced in her marriage. But instead, she found The Ladies Alpine Society, and is now pressed into planning a fundraising ball with the expedition’s accountant, Leo Moon. Prudence feels out of her depth, but glad to have a partner-in-crime to help her navigate British culture. But the taciturn Mr. Moon doesn’t like her—or does he like her too much?
Prudence Cabot sailed to Europe to find a lover.. As an American widow flush with cash, she has hopes of finding the burning, passionate love she never experienced in her marriage. But instead, she found The Ladies Alpine Society, and is now pressed into planning a fundraising ball with the expedition’s accountant, Leo Moon. Prudence feels out of her depth, but glad to have a partner-in-crime to help her navigate British culture. But the taciturn Mr. Moon doesn’t like her—or does he like her too much?. One look and she saw right through him.. Leo Moon is not his real…
