STEALING INTO THE PAST

Launching the newly-created Fitzglen family on their maiden voyage in Chalice of Darkness, I trawled a great many legends to provide them with a plot.

There is, of course, an abundance of material when it comes to legends and lore and myths.  Some might be true, some might be heavily embroidered, and a great many are probably outright fiction. But most of the stories can be used as the base of a plot – especially a plot involving a family who are proud of their reputation as one of London’s leading theatrical families in the early 1900s, but who are equally proud of their other profession.  The Fitzglens pursue this second profession very discreetly indeed; unknown to most of Edwardian London, they are what they like to term society burglars.

The world is littered with a great many intriguing legends, of course, and most of the ones that thread England’s past in particular have a pleasing touch of eeriness.  There are spectral coaches that rattle across ancient courtyards to herald a death – ghostly music from empty rooms – disgruntled apparitions demanding the righting of wrongs. There are grey ladies in old rectories, and occasionally even a mischievous gentleman in Elizabethan costume, hinting slyly that he knows where an undiscovered Shakespearean folio is buried.

But as well as that, there are stories of gifts allegedly bestowed by grateful monarchs on their subjects – bowls or cups or religious vessels, all beautiful, most valuable, but several that carry strange pledges or disquieting warnings.  Out of this embarrassment of riches, for me, one legend stood out.

The Muncaster Luck. 

The story goes that in the mid-1400s no less a person than Henry Vl gave to a noble Cumberland family a bowl, in gratitude to them for sheltering him during his exile after losing his Throne to Edward lV. 

The family were the Penningtons of Muncaster Castle, and Henry’s gift to Sir John Pennington carried a pledge that the bowl held good fortune, and that as long as it was unbroken the Penningtons would prosper.  That belief has survived from that century to this – as, remarkably, has the bowl itself.

A fragment of an old verse apparently promises:

        “It shall bless thy bed, it shall bless thy board,
	They shall prosper by this token,
	In Muncaster Castle good luck shall be
	Till the charméd cup is broken.”

The story held out an alluring hand. But I thought that to use the Muncaster legend itself – especially as the bowl can still be viewed in Muncaster Castle – could be fraught with potential problems.  Historical facts often have the annoying way of tripping up fictional events. But there seemed no reason why a whole new legend could not be created – that of a bowl, or, better still a chalice, in similar vein to the Muncaster Bowl, but with a dark back-story that would be all its own. 

And so the the Talisman Chalice of the book came into being.

Rather than assign this fictional Chalice’s origins to the hapless Henry Vl, I arranged for it to make its first appearance in the company of Richard II, who already had a few robust tales in his armoury, and whose reputation I thought could probably take one more.  By this point in the writing of the book, the Chalice itself had collected a few robust tales of its own, as well – most notably that anyone who possessed it ‘wrongfully’ would be dragged into a darkness ‘from which he or she would never emerge’.  Which could be interpreted as a medieval warning to enterprising thieves that if the Chalice were to be stolen, a very bad fate would befall those who stole it.

All of which resulted in Jack Fitzglen attempting to uncover scandals and secrets, and to encounter a dark danger that was to threaten his beloved theatre of thieves. 

Having dealt with the part of the story that would stretch across several centuries and encompass a few changes of royal dynastic rule – and having incorporated what promised to be a satisfying touch of the macabre into the mixture – there then came the matter of how the insouciant Fitzglens could actually track down the Chalice.  Led by the inventive Jack, they could certainly explore scholarly documents and investigate academic lines of enquiry.  But it seemed equally likely that they would hunt out clues within the raucous, often-scandalous Edwardian theatre world to which they belonged. Because mightn’t plays have been written about the Talisman Chalice?  Or even songs?  This latter idea was definitely a possibility. Music hall songs of that era often concealed all kinds of secrets, and a number of them frequently contained deeper meanings than might be apparent today.   Many people know the famous, ‘My Old Dutch’, and the line about, ‘We’ve been together now for forty years/And it don’t seem a day too much’.  But it’s perhaps not so widely known that the song was written as the husband’s farewell to his wife as they trudge up the hill to the workhouse, knowing that once there, they’ll be separated for the first time in all their forty years.

I greatly enjoyed making use of the wonderful music hall tradition of song-writing for this story, and I’m also immensely grateful to Henry Vl for giving the Pennington family the Muncaster Bowl – and in the process providing me with the base for the plot of Chalice of Darkness. 

 And I’m delighted that the Bowl itself is still at Muncaster Castle – still intact – and hopefully still containing the luck handed down by a long-ago King of England.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chalice-Darkness-Theatre-Thieves-mystery/dp/144830640X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

THE DEVIL’S IN THE MUSIC… just as much as he’s in the detail

The Devil’s Harmony

Music is a brilliant tool for setting just about any scene and creating any mood. 

For starters it can be unashamedly romantic: for example Fred Astaire serenading Ginger Rogers with Jerome Kern’s, The Way You Look Tonight, in the film, Swing Time. It doesn’t matter that Fred’s voice wasn’t perhaps the finest, nor that the film, viewed today, has got a bit scratchy.  It still makes you want to be floating around a flower-decked ballroom with French windows open to a night garden. 

At the other end of the scale it can be heart-wrenching. Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter being brave to an accompaniment of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, insisting to Trevor Howard that she is not crying, there’s something in her eye. Would that scene have been as moving without the music?

And on a different level again, it can be rousing – as with Bob Dylan adding his own gravelly note to the Sixties with his stirring anthem of change and protest and rebellion, in The Times They Are a-Changing.

But on yet another level there’s music so dark and so filled with menace that it can churn up real dread for the listener. The opening chords of the iconic and massive Toccata and Fugue – usually ascribed to J. S. Bach and sometimes referred to as storm music – are apt to conjure up images of the classic horror film opening – the ancient crypt, the cobwebbed stone pillars, the overgrown graveyard…   

Working out the details of a fifth outing for music researcher and historian, Phineas Fox, it was that impression of dark dread that I wanted to harness and convey to the reader. 

There were certainly plenty of music legends and snippets of genuine fact to plunder for a plot. For starters, there was the tale of the virtuoso violinist, Paganini, rumoured to have been involved in black magic practices, and denied burial by the Church for four years. His coffin was trundled half across Europe during those four years, which is surely macabre all by itself.  And then there was the odd little story that a veiled woman handed Beethoven a music score, saying he could make use of it, but he must never reveal who had given it to him.  That, too, deserves a plot of its own. Also not to be forgotten is the famous legend of a piper wearing multi-coloured – “pied” – clothing, cheated out of payment for rat-catching in a small town in Saxony, and luring children to their deaths with his music by way of punishment… 

With that memory of the Pied Piper, came the idea of using death music for a plot.

There’s death music in plenty – with assorted legends as accessories to much of it.  There are Dances of Death, Funeral Marches – there are gothic-flavoured pieces, including black metal and dark-wave punk music. Just about every classical composer seems to have dipped a toe into music to celebrate or commiserate death. Chopin wrote a Death March, and so did Handel. Saint-Saens, who generally liked to focus on light-hearted themes, provided the world with the Danse Macabre, while Wagner and Mahler, as is probably to be expected, composed deep, dark pieces – Seigried’s Funeral March in Götterdämmerung from the former, and the Trauermarsch – the Funeral March – by Mahler in his 5th Symphony.

Music is sprinkled with a fair number of  saints – St Cecilia is perhaps the best known, but there’s also St Gregory, who gave the world the famous Gregorian Chant.  But there are figures from the dark side, as well, and in particular, there’s a medieval devil with a musical quirk to his nature.  As devils go, he’s not especially well known, but he’s named, which is useful – all the best exorcists insist that to banish a devil you need to know his name.  This one is called Amdusias, and he’s apparently a Grand Duke in the satanic heirarchy, commanding 29 legions.  Which presumably isn’t to be sneezed at.  His chief claim to fame – maybe that should be infamy – is his ability to whip up an entire orchestral concert at the drop of a forked tongue or the tap of a cloven hoof.  The eerie thing about this ability, though, is that while the music was always described as overwhelming, (devils seldom do things by halves), those who claimed to have heard it always insisted they saw no musicians – not the merest shadow of one.  Nor did they see any fragment of a music score. It was this last statement that struck me as eerie, because you’d expect even demonic musicians, however talented, to need to consult a score at times, and occasionally to absent-mindedly leave a page or two behind.  ‘But,’ say the stories, solemnly, ‘that is the point. Amdusias’s music was never written down’.

Never written down.  It was this concept of music that had been remembered and handed down over the ages – but that had never been written down – that caught my interest. Mankind has a marvellous tradition of stories being handed down by word of mouth, of course. All the way back to the tales that were spun around prehistoric cave fires, and to the bards and the Irish shanachie who wore cloaks made of birds’ feathers, and were highly respected members of the community. And perhaps there were occasions when some those stories were so damning or so potentially dangerous that no one had dared to write them down. But could that apply to music? Could there once have been a piece of music that had never been committed to paper because no one had dared to do so?

With this thought, the plot for The Devil’s Harmony came into being, and with it the music that I eventually called the Dark Cadence.  As a side note, originally the music’s title was The Dissonance, and I happily wrote four chapters, before realizing that a Mozart piece had the by-name of the Dissonance Quartet.  (Quartet No 19 in C Major, written for two violins, viola and cello, if we’re to be exact).

So, beaten to the post by my all-time favourite composer and Desert Island Disc companion, I cast around for an alternative.  And the Dark Cadence came into being.

Phineas Fox, in his fifth musical mystery tour, discovers that the Dark Cadence is indeed death music – but death music of a very particular kind.  The fragments of its legend hinted that it had been known as execution music – that it had been played at scaffolds and guillotines and outside death cells, and that it had accompanied many a wretched condemned soul on the last fateful walk to the block or the noose or the firing squad.

But what Phin didn’t know at the start of his investigations was the reason for the fierce secrecy that had always surrounded the Dark Cadence.  

Did he uncover the reason?  Did he even find the music? 

Well, it’s all in the book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Devils-Harmony-Phineas-Fox-Mystery/dp/0727889885/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Sarah+Rayne+Devil%27s+Harmony&qid=1606123330&sr=8-1

MUSICAL KEYS … The legacy of the music halls

_{Oxford Music Hall}

Old songs and half-forgotten shreds of old music can be a gift to an author.  Rather than sprinkling a crime scene with conveniently dropped, helpfully initialled handkerchiefs, partially burned letters or hidden keys to secret passageways, a song from years gone by can make it surprisingly easy for an inquisitive character to find his or her way back into the past – and from there solve any number of a book’s mysteries.

Songs can even contain clues about long-ago plans for an assassination, or plots to unseat reigning monarchs and install pretenders.  They can reveal truths about the scandalous secrets of powerful people, or disclose details of famous robberies or forgeries.

 And, of course, if a suitable song doesn’t exist, the author can simply write one – which can be great fun in itself. 

The Victorian and Edwardian music halls offer rich hunting grounds for old songs containing meanings and messages.  Places such as The Canterbury in Lambeth – Wilton’s in Tower Hamlets – Collins’ in Islington – the Cider Cellars – the Middlesex in Drury Lane (the famous ‘Old Mo’) – and many more, would have thrummed with the music of the day.  And that music and those songs often incorporated comments on current events – sly jibes at politicians – dissatisfaction about working conditions.  Frequently there was propaganda, too, although that was usually wrapped up in lively, sometimes-bawdy humour, and given domestic settings with which audiences would instantly identify.

When the former costermonger and barrow-boy, Gus Elen – known to his many followers as the coster comedian – belted out the  bitter humour of his song about housing shortages and overcrowding, his audiences delightedly shouted the chorus with him:       

"Oh, it really is a very pretty garden
  And Chingford to the   Eastward could be seen.
  With a ladder and some glasses
  You could see to Hackney Marshes
  If it wasn’t for the houses inbetween".

They sympathised, too, when, in the 1890s, Albert Chevalier sang ‘My Old Dutch’.  Most people today probably know the famous first line of that song – ‘We’ve been together now for forty years/And it don’t seem a day too much’. 

But perhaps not too many people know the song was written as a lament.  That it’s the husband’s farewell to his wife as they trudge up the hill to the workhouse, knowing that once there, they’ll be separated for the first time in all their forty years.  That’s undoubtedly something Victorian and Edwardian audiences would have identified with.  They knew all about the workhouse – that bleak fate that was the terror of so many.

_{Marie Lloyd}

They knew, as well, that when Marie Lloyd sang cheerfully about following the van, she was singing about eviction, about not being able to pay the rent, about having to move away, but doing it furtively – after dark – in order to escape bailiffs and hide the shame…   They could sympathise and understand with the singer following the removal van and then being unable to find her way home because she had called at the pub for a drink or two…    

"My old man said, ‘Follow the van – don’t dilly dally on the way.            
Off went the van, with the home packed in it, 
I walked behind with me old cock linnet. 
But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,
Lost me way and don’t know where to roam.
For I stopped off on the way to have the old half quartern
Now I can’t find my way home”

 There were much darker songs, as well – songs that were sometimes called execution ballads.  One of the most famous of these was probably the Ballad of Sam Hall – the lament of the condemned, unrepentant man waiting to be hanged.  The song is believed to portray the defiant anger of an early 18th century criminal, hanged – probably at Tyburn – for robbing the rich to feed the poor.

The lyrics vary slightly, depending on which source you consult, but each verse certainly seems to have ended with the lines, “I hate you one and all – Damn your eyes!”

The song was regularly performed in the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane, and according to Punch, audiences were often convinced that the singer was actually bound for the gallows.  Punch also informed its readers that the performances were “popular not only among tavern haunters and frequenters of the night houses, but also with the gentry and aristocracy, who do vote it a thing to be heard, although a blackguard…”

 Reading that, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the grisly practice of attending public hangings, which, to many people, represented a day out.  It was regarded as a chance to meet up with old friends and make new ones.  You’d take a few sandwiches and a bottle of beer to pass the time until the condemned man was brought out.  If you were in France, of  course, you probably even took along your knitting…

There was, though, another, much brighter, side to music hall songs. There was the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and who walked along the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air.  That would certainly have been a cheerful thing to hear if a visit to the local pawnshop was looming, or if you were currently engaged in dodging the rent man.  For, after all, if  Charles Coburn, (who performed the song on numerous occasions), could make his fortune in such a fashion, surely others might one day do the same?  And when Mr Coburn issued his genial invitation to Come Where the Booze is Cheaper, a delighted shout of assent must surely have gone up.

And could there be better dreams for young men than of one day dressing like Burlington Bertie and sauntering along like a toff, or copying George Leybourne – ‘Champagne Charlie’ himself – who ‘only drank champagne’?  Or of sinking the wine recommended by Leybourne’s rival, ‘The Great Vance’, who sang about Cool Burgundy Ben and Cliquot, Cliquot.

The girls would have been given dreams too – dreams of The Only Boy in the World, and of riding with him On a Bicycle Made for Two.

And if they were hesitant about permitting a young man’s advances, they had only to listen to the irrepressible Marie Lloyd’s maxim:         

“I always hold with having it if you fancy it -
 If you fancy it, that’s understood,
And suppose it makes you fat
I don’t worry over that,
For a little of what you fancy does you good.”

Most actors will declare that all theatres have ghosts, starting with Drury Lane’s famous ‘Man in Grey’ and its capering Regency comedian, Joe Grimaldi, all the way down to the humbler levels of spectral chars eternally trying to scrub out fake blood after Macbeth’s death, or phantom stagehands who obligingly hand over a stage brace, then vanish in a puff of thespian-tinged vapour.

 There were – and probably still are – other forms of spooks, too.  A snatch of song has drifted down from an unnamed source, in which its composer affectionately celebrates the tradition of the ghost ‘walking’ each week – that being theatrical slang for payment of wages:

‘On Friday nights the ghost walks/Rattling its chains to itself;           
For that’s the night the ghost hands out the pelf.
On Friday night the ghost walks/Looking as white as a sheet.
Cheerless as sin, so we buy it some gin,
And some bedsocks for its feet.’

 It’s still just about possible to touch the music hall era; to feel and sense – and smell! – its  atmosphere.  Flaring gaslight and limelight; the scents of mutton and ale pies, of bags of hot chestnuts and whelks and jellied eels…   Ale and porter and perhaps a little gin for the ladies…  And always the raucous crowds, the cheering or booing of the performers, the arguments, the romantic assignations, the rivalries… 

_{Canterbury Music Hall}

Photographs exist of those places, even though most of them are no longer standing.  The sounds are still with us, as well, in the scratchy old recordings that have survived, and that provide the glimmer of an insight into how people spoke and sang in those days – of how words were differently pronounced.  Hearing those early recordings is like reaching out a hand and feeling it brush the fingertips of the vibrant colourful characters who enlivened those bygone stages.  

Long may their voices echo down the years – and, metaphorically, across the pages.  

Author's note:   This article first appeared in Historia, the magazine of the Historical Writers' Association.

DANCING INTO MURDER

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Dance-Phineas-Fox-Mystery/dp/0727850121/?

Embarking on a new outing for music historian and researcher, Phineas Fox, it seemed to me that it was time for him to explore uncharted territory. 

To date he had wandered happily and generally quite productively through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, helped (occasionally hampered), by the various characters who surrounded him. 

He had investigated his way through the evil machinations of Heinrich Himmler in the 1940s, a brace of assassins out to murder the Russian tsar, (two Russian, tsars, in fact, although I should make it clear that they were in two separate books – Death Notes and The Devil’s Harmony), and, more recently, had uncovered some startling facts about the all-time arch-villain Jack the Ripper.

But how about taking Phin back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century this time – eras rich in music legends and theatrical scandals? It was then that the figure of Will Kempe made his entrance, and amiably and hopefully positioned himself centre stage.

Master Kempe doesn’t figure particularly prominently in the annals of those times, nor is there very much information to be found about him.  It’s clear, though, that he was well known in his day – he was a clown-actor, a fellow player of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, and considered the successor to the great comic-performer, Richard Tarlton.  He was also an early investor in The Globe Theatre, and he’s believed by many to have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

However, what Kempe is remembered for is that he embarked on an astonishing marathon, in which he danced from London to Norfolk in nine days – taking suitable stops along the way for rest and refreshment – and that he apparently undertook the task for a bet. 

I read all this with delight, checked a few of the facts, and began to see the possibility of Phin Fox becoming entangled in Will Kempe’s world –finding traces of a legend attached to Kempe – a legend that had left a dark imprint in a remote corner of Norfolk. 

From there it was only a step to the premise of a dance – but a dance so hung about with macabre memories that it was still whispered how, when it had been performed, children were told to stay indoors – and on no account to look through their windows.

And so came into being the story for The Murder Dance.

In writing the book, I was helped enormously by Kempe’s own published account of what he called his ‘Nine Days’ Wonder’.  It would be nice to think that the phrase itself originated with Kempe, but a brief exploration of various primary sources suggests it’s actually a much older term, probably dating to the 1300/1400s.  It appears to have been made use of by Chaucer, (and when did Geoffrey pass up the chance to  seize on a choice expression?) and also by a French prince, captured during the Battle of Agincourt who whiled away his sojourn in an English gaol by dashing off a few verses of poetry.

 Whatever the genesis of the expression, incredibly Kempe’s book can still be found in later reprints.  Even after so many centuries,  his enthusiasm and delight for his capering expedition fairly dances off the pages.

 Fragments and the flavour of his music are still with us – two of his jigs survive in English and two in German.  Scores titled ‘Kempe’s Jig’ are held in the Cambridge University Library, and a famous seventeenth-century ‘Kempe’s Jig’ was published in The English Dancing Master by John Playford, around 1651. The man himself has been portrayed in modern-day films and on TV: most notably in the film, Shakespeare in Love, and remarkably in a Doctor Who TV episode.

He may have been sparsely documented, but his name and his legend have endured.  And so, Master Kempe, thank you for accepting that extraordinary bet, and for chronicling your astonishing nine days of dancing from London to Norfolk.  And thank you, especially, for capering into my imagination and providing me with the core of the plot for The Murder Dance.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Macabre-Phineas-Fox-Mystery/dp/072788896X/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/261-6023325-5229527?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Devils-Harmony-Phineas-Fox-Mystery/dp/0727889885/ref=pd_sim_1/261-6023325-5229527?

LOCKING DOWN PLOTS AND ZOOMING INTO MEETINGS

There are always decisions to be made during the writing of a book. Usually these are straightforward and familiar – for example, should a character be killed off in Chapter Three, or can the tension be stretched out until, say, Chapter Eight?

There are also the perplexing questions of who can get together with whom, and whether to allow a ‘hand-in-hand into the sunset’ moment, or to write an emotional farewell scene with the hero going doughtily off to fight a war, or the heroine dedicating her life to nursing.  Or, of course, the other way round.  Also, you have to decide whether the villain should turn out to be the mild-mannered gentleman who deceived almost everyone in the book, (hopefully including the reader), or if it would be better to stay with the first idea of it being the kitten-faced girl who has been weaving a web of greedy intrigue since her original entrance.

What an author doesn’t expect is to be faced with decisions about a worldwide pandemic, and how much – or how little – of it needs to be incorporated into the plot. Suddenly you’re presented with questions about whether the current storyline will even stand up in a post-coronavirus world, (always assuming there ever is such a world), or whether you dare hope that by publication date things will have reached some semblance of normality, and readers will be grateful to read about a virus-free situation.

Even with a book already written and scheduled for publication, you suddenly find that while working on a few last-minute editorial suggestions you’ve included a conversation between two characters that wasn’t in the original ms.  ‘My word,’ says one character to the other, during a plane trip essential to the plot, ‘My word, isn’t it nice to be able to travel to other countries again.’

You realize that touching on travel restrictions is starting up a whole new plot-line you don’t want and that will confuse the characters, let alone the reader, so you crossly delete the conversation.  You also realize that nobody these days says, ‘My word’, and wonder if you’re subconsciously trying to travel backwards to a time when life was gentler.

It’s not only the writing that throws up imponderables, though. There are on-line meetings, which start off by being rather novel and even fun.  You realise you don’t need to dress up for them – or, at least, you have to dress up the top half a bit, but nobody can see if you’re wearing your old tracksuit bottoms and bedroom slippers. Then you think you can set the scene beforehand, so that the others see you against an interesting background.  After all, people interviewed on TV do that.  So far, I have coveted the sitting room curtains of the Shadow Chancellor, wanted to know where the Swedish Deputy Prime Minister got the painting in her study, discovered that the editor of a prominent Sunday newspaper has the exact same sofa as mine, and tried to read the book titles on the shelves of several government ministers, which resulted in a bad case of cricked neck.

But with that in mind, you decide to reposition the computer in order to show your own bookshelves.  You reason that this will look nicely scholarly, and will be much better than displaying a jumble of cushions on the sofa, which would merely confirm most people’s opinion that writers are untidy slobs.

However, it’s important to be wary about repositioning the computer, because you can end up with a blank and unresponsive monitor – which is what happened to me, and which is a truly alarming experience when halfway through writing a book.  It was only after crawling around on the floor for an hour, convinced that Chapter Ten was lost for ever, and after untangling a wilderness of wires and dispossessing several indignant spiders of their homes, that I realised I had merely dislodged a connection behind the monitor.  Chapter Ten is therefore safe, but any future zooming will continue to be conducted from the sofa corner, with a jumble of cushions.

 

RIPPING OFF THE VILLAIN

The creation of a villain can be a surprisingly fascinating exercise.  There are so many roles they can be allotted.  For starters, it’s usually necessary – and hopefully interesting for the reader – to show their multi-layered lives, because they aren’t always stalking hapless heroines through fog-bound Victorian streets, or laying macabre traps for unwary widows with useful fortunes.  They have to do ordinary things like collecting the dry-cleaning or going to the dentist.  Applying for mortgages, perhaps:   ‘Occupation, sir?  A doctor?  Oh, well, Dr Crippen, we’re always happy to lend money to members of the medical profession…’   Or, possibly: ‘We’ll just get this house in Rillington Place surveyed before you buy it, Mr Christie…’

Alternatively, they can be sinisterly sexy gentleman with dangerously charismatic powers. George du Maurier, creating Svengali, gave the world a mesmeric character, as well as a new word for the English language, and even a legal tactic – the ‘Svengali Defence’, in which a defendant claims to be a pawn in the scheme of an overpowering and influential criminal mastermind.  It also gave actors from Beerbohm Tree to John Barrymore and Donald Wolfit the chance to flex their fruitier acting techniques.  (It probably helped the sales of Trilby hats too, although that’s a frivolous side speculation).

If it’s to be a villainess, however, the author probably can’t do much better than base a killer on the seventeenth-century Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Bathory.  Unlike Bram Stoker’s blood-quaffing villain, she doesn’t seem to have actually drunk blood.  Instead, she slaughtered several hundred young girls so that she could bathe in their blood to preserve her youth and beauty.  Her story has come down to the present day in fragments – mostly from the archives of the Court of Vienna where, because of their horrific content, the documents relating to her life and death were kept under lock and key for more than a century.

But to take on – to incorporate into a plot – the man who is probably the best-known serial killer ever…?  To present an aspect of him that nobody has thought of…?

It’s possibly fair to say that no mass-murderer has left quite such a wealth of dark legends as the man that nineteenth-century England called the Whitechapel Murderer, Leather Apron…    The man the world came to know as Jack the Ripper.

Even today, the truth about Jack’s identity and his eventual fate remain the subject of discussion and speculation.  Films have been made about him, books have been written about him, and the theories posed as to his motives and his identity range from the sensible and near-credible to the outright bizarre and the wildly fantastical.

He has, severally, been credited with being a person of some prominence – a leading doctor or surgeon – a member of the police force, or the government – a famous painter – a leading Freemason.  Some theories connect him to royalty – even to having been royal himself.

When I started to write Music Macabre, the fourth outing for music researcher and historian Phineas Fox, I hadn’t really intended Jack to be a major player.  Phineas, happily pursuing scholarly research into the life of Franz Lizst, was meant to unexpectedly come upon a fragment of music – a song – that seemed to have links back to the Ripper’s reign.

But somehow – very gradually and almost without my realizing it – Jack got into the story in a far stronger and much more insistent way than I had expected.  He was present in every plot twist, he influenced characters’ motives and directed their actions – it was as if he peered out of every dark shadow surrounding the nineteenth century players, and reached out to the present-day through them.

Whoever he was, inevitably I faced the problem of what to do with him in the closing chapters.  Generally, a villain, no matter how charismatic or multi-layered, does have to be given his or her just deserts in the final chapter.  It’s not exactly a convention that has to be observed, but it’s expected.  Even if he/she isn’t tried and sentenced in the conventional manner, some kind of fate has to descend. This might cheat an author of writing a taut courtroom/prison cell scene, but it does open up a beautiful range of dramatic possibilities, including sending the culprit tumbling over the Reichenbach Falls, being submerged beneath the Paris Opera House, spontaneously combusting like Krook in Bleak House, or falling into the jaws of a crocodile as Captain Hook memorably did in Peter Pan.  And Elizabeth Bathory got her come-uppance when she was bricked up in a lonely windowless room, in which she lived for four years.

But how do you deal out a fate to Jack the Ripper?  Particularly when the theories and suggestions as to what happened to him and why his killing spree stopped are almost as thick on the ground as the speculations about his identity.

He died…   He fled to an unnamed country…  He fell into the Thames and drowned…   He was hauled off to a lunacy asylum, either because he had not been recognized for who and what he was – or because he had been recognized, but was too well-known a figure to stand trial.

Could you even let him go, and allow yourself the fun of allotting to him one of the hammy Hammer finale lines?  Fu Manchu, in the last reel of most of the film versions of Sax Rohmer’s books, comes to mind here – he had the way of raising an elegant hand, and portentously announcing that, ‘The world will hear from me again.’

But as far as anyone knows, the world never did hear from Jack the Ripper again.  His legacy remains, though – it still reaches into the present, and it’s that dark legacy that brought about the writing of Music Macabre.

A DISCORDANCE OF ANCIENT LAWS

I wasn’t expecting to find I had combined an ancient law and opera for a book, but Song of the Damned, (Book 3 of the Phineas Fox series), turned out to have both elements at its heart.

It’s not, of course, so very rare for opera and the law to meet up. In Lohengrin Wagner invokes the laws of the Holy Grail as part of the plot, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Gilbert & Sullivan light-heartedly satirize the legal system for Trial by Jury, spattering it with cheerful quarrels over breaches of promise.

But it was a far older law and a much more modern opera that inspired the plot of Song of the Damned.

In 1953, Frances Poulenc composed an opera called Dialogues of the Carmelites.  It relates the grim and emotionally-charged, true story of the imprisonment of sixteen Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution. They were captured because of their religious beliefs, and subsequently executed. The execution seems to have been an extraordinary piece of theatre – of which Poulenc makes full use. The nuns were forced to form a queue for the guillotine, and to mount the scaffold one by one, with the most junior novice being first. As they waited for death, they re-affirmed their religious vows aloud, and sang various hymns, (reports vary as to what the hymns actually were depending on which source you use).  The singing was punctuated by the relentless fall of the guillotine for each nun, their voices gradually diminishing as each was beheaded, until, at the last, only the lone voice of the Mother Superior was to be heard.  And then there was silence.

This was a scene that had great impact on me. The dreadful inevitability of the massive guillotine blade swishing down – the helpless progression of the nuns towards it. But then – as is frequently the way with novelists – I began to wonder whether there might be a plot to be found in the story.  Poulenc had already made use of it, of course, and so had one or two other people. A writer called Georges Bernanos wrote a screenplay around it, and the text of that was based on an earlier short story – The Last at the Scaffold written in the early 1930s by Gertrud von le Fort.

So it looked as if the fount had been squeezed dry. Or had it?  Supposing a plot could be woven from the left-overs? Supposing those original nuns could be given links with other nuns – maybe a small convent community in a rural corner of England…  And supposing Phineas Fox, the music historian whose third outing this was to be, found a lost medieval ritual within a locally-written piece of music – a macabre ritual and a piece of music that could be traced back to those nuns…?

So far so good. What about the setting, though?  As anyone who has read any of my books will know, I’m keen on atmospheric settings and I’m very keen indeed on houses and buildings with intriguing histories.

It was at that point in the deliberations, and in the early and difficult stages of drafting a plot, that I came across a fragment of a very old English law.

It happened by purest chance. One afternoon having become lost in the depths of the countryside, I drove past a field with a sign on the gate saying, ‘Infanger’s Field’.

Infanger’s Field?

The English countryside is, it must be said, liberally strewn with strange and intriguing names. Quite near to where I live is a village called Coven.  It’s an extremely nice place, but its name is always very deliberately pronounced ‘Coe-Ven’.  Purists carefully point out that the name derives from the Anglo-Saxon, cofum¸meaning either a cove or a hut, but despite that, there are occasionally dark mutterings suggesting that the place once had witchcraft associations, and that the pronunciation was politely slurred to hide that fact.

Then there are all those instances of Glue Works Lane and Slaughter Yard. There’s Pudding Lane where the Great Fire of London reputedly started in a baker’s shop. On the other hand, there are places whose names are open to interpretation, such as Cockshutt in Shropshire, which, despite sounding like a venue for a Carry On film, is likely to derive from fowl hunting activities. Other names are satisfyingly rooted in the past: Oxford has Brasenose College and Brasenose Lane – supposedly from the Brazen Nose door knocker of the original sixteenth century Hall.  Incredibly, though, the city also once had the now-lost Shitbarn Lane, c.1290, which ran between Oriel Street and Alfred Street.

But Infanger’s Field?

I dashed home to scour bookshelves and the internet. The bookshelves yielded several indignant spiders, dispossessed of their homes, and a couple of dictionaries and encyclopaedia with ageing pages but legible information.  The internet provided several alternative spellings for the word and about 3,000 search results.

And it seems that the word comes from the Old English infangene-þēof –  ‘Thief seized within’ or ‘in-taken-thief’.  Infangenthief or infangentheof, no matter how you spell it, was, an Anglo-Saxon arrangement, supposedly from the time of Edward the Confessor – c.1003-1066, and one of the last of the royal House of Wessex.

It apparently permitted the owners of a piece of land the right to mete out justice to miscreants captured within their estates, regardless of where the poor wretches actually lived. On occasions it also allowed the culprits to be chased in other jurisdictions, and brought back for trial.  The justice that was meted out was often extremely severe – there was no cheerful Gilbert & Sullivan principle of letting the punishment fit the crime in those days.

The privilege of exercising this law was granted to feudal lords, and inevitably to religious houses. And later, when the Normans came barrelling in they made cheerful use of it as well.  It helped keep the rebellious Saxons in their place. The law fell more or less into disuse in the fourteenth century and all-but vanished from England’s history.  Except for the occasional name here and there.  Like Infanger’s Field.

I have no idea if it was a fragment from the past I encountered that day – perhaps a shred of some long-ago feudal baron who had named a field as a warning to miscreants. And I’m doubtful if I could find the field again.

But there it was. A long-ago storyline involving a group of nuns in the French Revolution and a macabre musical ritual.  And there, too, was the potential for an atmospheric house that could be given the name Infanger’s Cottage.  A house whose present-day occupants might find themselves forced to make use of the ancient law to guard the secrets that dwelled in the cottage’s foundations – secrets that stretched back to those long-ago nuns and the ritual that had been part of their mysterious story.

SONG OF THE DAMNED is published 31 July in the UK and 1 November in the US.

 

 

 

PUTTING A BOOK TO BED

Finishing the writing of any book is a curiously mixed experience. There’s a sense of achievement and even a muted delight because you finally got there. But there’s also hideous doubt, because although you got there, you’re no longer sure if it’s as good as it seemed when you exuberantly wrote ‘Chapter One’ about a year earlier.  You’re also struggling to see a resemblance between the finished product, and the original synopsis your editor and your agent liked so much.  You remember the famous line about characters: “You do everything you can to raise them right, and as soon as they hit the page, they do any damn thing they please.”

Still, when you come to the last page, the euphoria means that you can forget the bad parts of writing the book. Or can you? There was the time you deleted an entire chapter by mistake, and had only the fuzziest recollection of what it was all about. You knew it included blackmail, seduction, and probably most of the crimes in the Newgate calendar, but as for who did what to whom…  You had no idea. In the end you resigned yourself to never knowing who seduced, who blackmailed, and who did anything else, and you re-wrote the whole chapter. You almost managed to persuade yourself it was better than the deleted section, too.

Then there was the time when you spent the best part of a week frantically trying to think of a motive for a particular action which was vital to the entire plot. You certainly remember that, because you paced the floor (you even cleaned the floor at one point), tried out solutions ranging from vaguely unlikely to utterly implausible, crossly discarded them all, and decided to give up writing altogether.  At around 3 a.m. (insomnia being an inescapable by-product at this stage of a book), you suddenly saw a really good motive – and then found, on opening your original synopsis/ plot notes, that you had worked out that very solution a year earlier, before even starting to write the book.

Even sending the book to your agent and editor wasn’t free from trauma, because the printer broke down on the very morning of printing the ms, necessitating a frantic rush to various computer shops to buy a new one and then an entire day trying fathom how it worked. When you finally did get it operating, at the end of the print run the entire ms slid off the desk and scattered itself everywhere.  That entailed crawling around the floor, fielding 200+ out-of-sequence pages, and shuffling them into order. Inevitably, it took longer than it should have done, because you found yourself reading bits you had forgotten writing, and having to read on to find out what happened next. You then found a continuity error – characters knowing, and acting on, events before the events had actually happened.  So you had to comb the entire text to put that right, then print the whole thing all over again.

At this point, you decided to write all future books by longhand. After all, the great Victorian novelists did that. Then you remembered the length of some of their books (Bleak House inevitably came to mind), and changed your mind.

But once the ms was shovelled off to your agent and your editor, you felt entitled to a few indolent days. Undemanding TV, reading other authors’ books, meeting friends ignored for the last six months. First, though, you tried to wind down by determinedly tackling some of the tasks you had been able to put off on the grounds of being too busy. Defrosting the freezer for instance. That was when you discovered how many things you had forgotten to label. But you optimistically assumed that the plastic tub of pale viscosity in a forgotten cryogenic corner was home-made soup, which would be just right for an inclement January day. It turned out to be lemon mousse, (which you then remembered you had made for a long-ago meal at which you wanted to impress someone). You found out that lemon mousse does not take kindly to being heated.

That was when you decided it would be more restful to return to the desk and start writing another book.

 

WRITING THE MUSIC AND COMPOSING THE PLOT

Music has frequently been a catalyst for me in the creating of a plot, and it seems to have found its way into a good many of my books.  There’s the eerie death lament, ‘Thaisa’s Song’ in The Bell Tower, and the music hall songs in Ghost Song.  More recently, there’s the Phineas Fox series, with a music historian and researcher as the central character – although it has to be said that while Phin certainly gets entangled in music mysteries, he also finds himself drawn into other intriguing situations

But one of the difficulties with using music as a frame for a plot, is the embarrassment of riches that music’s history offers.                           There’s the macabre – such as the legend of how Paganini’s body was refused burial because of alleged participation in satanic rituals, and was apparently trundled across Europe for the best part of four years, before an appeal to the Pope finally allowed conventional burial.  That practically presents itself as a complete plot, there for the writing.     Or, if an author happens to incline towards the realms of the supernatural, there’s the dark tale of the Piper of Hameln to draw on – that infamous figure from the Middle Ages, who, when the townspeople reneged on payment for his rat-catching services, wrought his grisly revenge by luring the children into the mountains by his magical music.  You do have to be wary of sinister strangers offering peculiar deals, although the legend has certainly provided material for such diverse names as the Brothers Grimm, Robert Browning, and Walt Disney.
And, staying with the supernatural, might there really be a ‘Curse of the Ninth Symphony’, given that a surprising number of composers died after completing their ninth? The composer Philip Glass was convinced of it – to the extent that he insisted on completing his tenth symphony before allowing his ninth to be performed in public.

Moving away from the macabre, there’s the humorous, such as the Elizabethan caperings of one Will Kemp.  Master Kemp was a Shakespearean comic actor and ‘purveyor of mad jests and merry jigs’, and he accepted a bet that he could not dance from London to Norwich – roughly 80 miles (132 km).  He won the bet, although it took him nine days to do it – which he later chronicled as ‘The Nine Daie’s Wonder’ [sic].  Happily, though, the nine days don’t seem to have been entirely without a few lighter moments;  one version tells how, at one part of his journey, a young lady came out and danced a mile with him, to keep him company.  Some versions suggest slyly that caperings of a different kind took place, as well.  But that would be a tale for an entirely different kind of book, and in any case, Shakespeare, if he heard about his actor’s exploits, would have instantly spotted the potential for a bawdy romp scene, and very likely used a version of it in several of the plays.  (He probably did just that, although probably not in Hamlet or King Lear).

There are other, more straightforward mysteries, of course.  There’s a definite whodunnit flavour in the question of whether Salieri really did murder Mozart – witness Peter Shaffer’s play/film ‘Amadeus’, and also Alexander Pushkin’s 1830’s poetic drama, ‘Mozart and Salieri’.  There’s the question of why Schubert never finished his ‘Unfinished Symphony’.  To come more up-to-date, there’s surely a lively quest to be mapped out in solving the meanings and identifying the characters in Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’.

And so Phineas Fox, in his second outing, might have found himself imbroiled in any one of half a dozen plots, ancient or modern, classical or rock or jazz, any of which could be based on true stories.  I considered and discarded and researched and re-considered.  I tumbled half-forgotten books from my shelves, dispossessing armies of indignant spiders in the process, and I trawled libraries and the internet.

Then I latched onto the infamous tritone – the ‘Devil’s Chord’.

If we’re going to be technical (which always sounds nicely scholarly and looks impressive in this kind of article), the devil’s chord is an augumented 4^th, or Tritonus, and spans three steps in the scale.  It’s been described as one of the most dissonant music intervals around – so much so, that it was banned in Renaissance church music.   Church music was supposed to be a paeon of praise to God, and the tritone was considered so ugly that it wasn’t thought suitable.  Medieval arrangements even used it to represent the devil, and Roman Catholic composers sometimes used it for referencing the act of the crucifixion. Its dissonance can work to advantage in some cases, though. It’s remarkably effective as background music in films, where it can serve as a warning to the audience that something bad’s about to happen. That harsh discordance that tells you the killer’s outside the door with an axe.  Think shower curtains in Psycho.

It occurred to me that the devil’s chord might make a guest appearance in a composition that had become part of music legend.  But what could that legend be?
Well, as somebody once said, if you can’t find a genuine legend, create one of your own.

Music has often been composed to celebrate great events – coronations, births, victory in war.  But what about a legend in which a piece of music was written to celebrate not a happy, or a triumphant event, but something far darker?  Something so menacing its existence was kept secret?

It was at that point that I saw the whole plot.  I could see Phineas Fox peeling back the layers of a secret that had lain undisturbed for three quarters of a century – glimpsing edges and corners of it, and ending in delving into a very grisly fragment of musical history indeed.

And so, Chord of Evil was born.

FROM CLAY TABLETS TO ANDROID SCREEN

There’s a sense of familiarity and reassurance in much-read copies of books by favourite authors.  It’s comforting to turn a page and remember that this is the part where you spilled soup on the name of the murderer because last time you read it you had flu and were under a blanket on the sofa.  Or to realise you’re coming up to the part where you dropped the book in the bath, and that the renunciation scene between the lovers is permanently scented with Imperial Leather.  Even better, is embarking on the chapter detailing the villain’s midnight prowl through the dark old house, where the pages are spattered with hair dye, because you were trying to put magenta streaks in your hair, and you had 15 minutes to fill up while the colour soaked in.

 But in favour of of eReaders and iPads, it has to be said that it’s very convenient to carry around an entire library in a small device roughly the size of a sheet of A5 – to know that the flick of a switch can open up the complete works of just about every writer.  The more impatient reader also has the satisfaction of being able to download and start reading a book within a matter of minutes.  (Wi-fi connection permitting, and bank balance allowing).  Also, you can mop soup splashes off the screen, scrub out hair dye and rinse away soapsuds, and you don’t have to replace your complete works of Colin Dexter because the cat was sick on them.

In 3,500 BC, the Sumerians wrote their books on tablets of baked clay. A thousand years later, papyrus scrolls were the reading method of choice. We’ve come a long way since then and probably it’s just as well. The prospect of hauling a couple of dozen clay tablets onto the train to while away your journey is daunting.  Papyrus wasn’t something that could be packed into a shoulder bag or a beach tote, either – the history of the Egyptian King Ramses III was reportedly over 40 metres long.

Bookshops and libraries have changed dramatically, as well.  The ancient and vanished Library of Alexandria is reported as having, in addition to scrolls, a room for dining, a reading room, meeting rooms, gardens and lecture halls.  According to one source, an inscription above the shelves read, The place of the cure of the soul.
Forgotten glories…?  And yet today’s libraries often have a coffee area, a section for book clubs and talks – although it’s likely that the rows of computer terminals would have fazed the long-ago Alexandrians.

Once upon a time there were secondhand bookshops – marvellous places with creaking floorboards and intriguing cobwebby corners. You could spend hours in them, searching for lost titles by long-ago authors.  Often it was a good idea to take a few sandwiches and a flask with you, cancelling all engagements for the rest of the week.
But sad to relate, such places are dying out, although it should be noted that the world wide web has developed a quirky charm of its own.  I’ve bought secondhand books from sellers rejoicing in the internet names of Salty Mavis, Captain Jellyman Twinkle, and Alex the Fat Dawg.

Quite apart from the shops themselves being so intriguing, they were excellent venues for authors who had a character needing to discover a clue, and they were an absolute gift to writers of mysteries with an historic slant.  Any number of plots to assassinate a king or queen, to smuggle a pretender onto a throne, or topple a royal line, could be uncovered by a character searching diligently along dusty shelves.  Privately-printed diaries could be disinterred as well, revealing all manner of scandalous secrets.  On that last score, I’d have to give honourable mention to Denis Mackail’s short story, The Lost Tragedy – written in 1926, still to be found in various anthologies and well worth searching out.

And as for the debate about the printed page versus the screen – that’s something that will probably run for a very long time.