It may have come to your attention by now that I like to write in the 1920s! So, what inspired me to do that and why do I keep coming back to it?
My first foray into the decade was Lost in Time, and that was a sort of incidental kind of period piece. I began writing as the hundred year anniversary of World War One was marked and I was doing a lot of thinking about my grandparents. My father’s father was the only survivor of a tank crew; and my mother’s great-uncle was a runner between the trenches who was killed before he hit twenty.
I began thinking about how our experiences a hundred years later contrast with the experiences of that earlier generation. Those thoughts grew into Lost in Time, with Lew from 2016 bringing his modern lens to bear on the 1919 world he found himself in.
At that point in my writing I really didn’t have a plan. I discovery-wrote Lost in Time without any idea of what I was doing—I was just telling the story. It’s a happy-for-now rather than a happy-ever-after and Shadows on the Border was a natural extension that allowed me to explore the happy-for-now a bit more; and then I ended up needing a resolution for Will and Fenn, so The Hunted and the Hind came about. Once I began the story in book one, I just had to carry on until I got to the end. And of course, people’s stories don’t end when they begin a relationship, quite the opposite. That’s always something I’ve found difficult in my writing and my reading too.
In the meantime I was writing a serial for my newsletter subscribers. I had written a short-story called The Gate, set in 1919 as an introduction to the world before Lost in Time was published. It was short and full of paranormal stuff, but the relationship resolution was very tentative and I wanted to know what happened afterwards. That became Inheritance of Shadows. That’s a rural story, with a lot inspired by the old farmers I remember as a child—the ones who’s names are on the local war memorials as serving in the First World War.
These four books concentrate on men and the male experience of the war and what happens afterwards, when you come home.
With The Fog of War I’ve done various things a bit differently.
Firstly, it’s a book about women. Dr Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. I loved her when I wrote her and so did my editor, who encouraged me to write more about her. I think she was envisaging a kind of village doctor solves cosy mysteries kind of series, but it appears that I am congenitally unable to write long stories that don’t contain some sort of paranormal shenanigans. So here we are.
I began reading around women doctors and how they contributed to the war effort and I came across Dr Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, who ran the Endell Street Military Hospital. The institutions were staffed almost entirely by women and additionally, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson were together as a couple.
I then remembered my grandmother telling me about a local lady doctor who would visit her mother in the pre- and post- World War One years and hitch her skirts up and sit on the kitchen table, smoking and chatting. I have a friend who is part of that family and I asked if her husband could remember anything about her. She passed on that he remembered her from family gatherings in the 1960s and she was a tough old bird who smoked like a chimney. My friend, who is, handily, an archivist, also mentioned she had wind of another lady doctor who served in France but then came home and gave up the profession, got married and had children.
It was all grist to my mill.
Plus, the snappy dialogue and the Dorothy L. Sayers vibe I can bring to it makes it fun to write. I read a lot of 1920s and 1920s detective novels…The Toff, Miss Marple, Miss Fisher…what’s not to like?
So to answer my own question, I began with one idea and it’s all snowballed from there. I keep finding more and more interesting snippets from the 1920s that I want to explore.
The Fog of War will be published by JMS Books on 16th August 2021.