Research - planned and unplanned.

I made a trip to York last week - to have some fun, at the RNA Afternoon Tea, which was worth the six hour trip in itself, but I also wanted to complete a little piece of research. When I was last in York - probably about twenty years ago, we stumbled on a gatehouse in the city walls that had a small museum to Richard III. In one of the books that is half written and will be leaping back to life - I hope - once the day job is put to bed, the heroine reads a copy if JosephineTey's Daughter of Time (If you haven't read it you must)  and takes herself on a Richard III tour of the country. (I'm keeping her away from the hero at that point, so it has a purpose.) I did Bosworth and the new tomb and the car park and everything some time ago, but I wanted to complete it with the museum from York - which I was able to do, so now that is all taken care of and I only have to write the thing. It will probably only have a few lines in the book, but I wanted to visit all the places, for fun, as much as anything. You know about writers and research.

Interior of the gatehouse

The gatehouse from the city walls

I had a fabulous time in York - it is a lovely city. I stayed in a quirky boutique hotel, which has fed some ideas into a similar hotel which will be in another book, in a new romantic suspense series. I found an original copy of a book by author Elizabeth Gouge in a shop in the Shambles and treated myself as a memento of the weekend. (One of the Romantic Novelists' Association competitions has a trophy in her honour.) The hotel had a large library/lounge with a wild and wonderful selection of books - including a copy of the Dictionary of National Biography for the period of World War Two, which I have been trying track down for details on the man who was the Regional Commissioner for Wales - so I was able to take notes on that.  On Saturday morning I watched a troupe of Border Morris

The beautiful minster - I gatecrashed evensong.

dancers, and chatted to one of them about the costume. Forget bells and hankies - the Border Morris involves tattered black coats, hats and feathers, cudgels and black faced make up - a traditional method of disguising identity - quite spine stirring. There is a Border Morrris in another book of that romantic suspense series - one of the heroes plays the fiddle for them. It was good to see a troupe in action. I was so busy watching I didn't take pics!

Then on Sunday I discovered Fairfax House, which is a glorious Georgian building fitted out with correct period furniture. It was amazing - and gave me two more bits of research - a spinet and a bureau with multiple secret drawers. That is for a Georgian romantic suspense series which I have partly started and want to return to. It is where the private security service that features in the contemporary series begins - a secret society of dangerous rakes and dandies. I really want to write that one too.

All in all York was tremendously inspiring. Now I just have to get to those books in waiting - the characters have started to line up, demanding to be written and I don't know how long I can hold them off.

Once I get WW2 fixed ...

Back in Time

The Golden Age of Crime Writing is currently having a moment, as you may have noticed. Which has led to the reissue of a number of classics and lost treasures. And also means I have to exercise extreme restraint around the bookshop of the British Library, who are responsible for a number of the latter, if I don't want to end up spending a fortune.The covers alone are to die for.

Always looking for a good read, I was delighted to find a row of new issues of Josephine Tey's crime novels in my local library, and picked up The Man in The Queue which I first read years ago. I enjoyed it just as much, but there was one thing I noticed, which I think I have mentioned before in a post.

The classic novels often have an elastic sense of time.

In this one, the hero, Inspector Grant, spends a day sleuthing. He travels to Nottingham and is on the train at 10 am, (mentioned in the text) traces some witnesses, interrogates them, finds and has lunch with a local solicitor, does some more investigation, has coffee at the station while killing time before his train, making conversation with a waitress who is also serving other customers, arrives in London for what is described as a leisurely early dinner and is back on the street, in daylight (in March)  while late afternoon crowds and early evening revellers are mingling on the pavement, in time to spot a suspect in the crowd and give chase. All this bracketed by the two train journeys, which must have been by steam in 1929, and which take nearly two hours on today's trains. Somehow, I have my doubts about all that.

It's probably a writer's thing to notice stuff like that and the calculations amused me, and in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the book. In fact, I have a sneaky idea that this occasionally elastic timescale may be part of the charm of the Golden Age - contributing to the sense of things moving at a slower and perhaps more dignified pace.

I was also feeling slightly jealous, as I was wrestling with timings in a novella set in late December and realising that, no -  that scene cannot take place like that at that point. Because in December at that time, it will be dark.

If you haven't encountered the British Library Crime Classics and their glorious covers (I'm particularly fond of the ones featuring trains) take a look HERE  

On the trail of a king

I talked last week about research. Last weekend I had a really good time doing some.

It began with a romantic suspense that I have about  a quarter completed, but which got overtaken by life and stuff. I'd actually got to a bit where the heroine is spending a few days exploring the UK before facing something big and rather traumatic - but I'm not telling you about that, 'cos it's a major spoiler!

Anyway, I was thinking about the places she might go and at the time the re-interment of Richard III at Leicester was in the news and I had a light bulb moment - well, maybe a small candle, but still a moment. So - having picked up a copy of Josephine Tey's  Daughter of Time - which, incidentally, is the book that made me a Ricardian - my heroine decides to visit some of the sites related to Richard.

The romantic suspense got gummed in the works at about that point, but I knew that if and when it ever re-started some on-the- ground research would be called for. I'd been to York and seen locations there, but I wanted the Bosworth battle site where he fought and died, and the brand new stuff for the king they rediscovered buried under a municipal car park. I put organising that in the forward plan. Sometime.

Then, when I was beginning to wonder about the story again, and if and how I was going to restart work on it, the question of that necessary research came up. And  I found that the Travelsphere company was offering the exact weekend that I needed. So I spent last weekend in Leicester, in the company of eleven lovely ladies and one brave gentleman, and ably and enthusiastically led by Min, the tour manager, looking at all the places my heroine is going to visit. And, of course, talking pictures. These are a few of them.

The banners of Richard III and Henry VII on the hill overlooking the battle field.

A view down to where it is now thought the battle of Bosworth, where Richard died, took place. 

The new tomb - 

- which is in Leicester Cathedral

Commemorative stone on display at the visitors' centre where you can see the excavated grave site.