Happy birthday to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who would have been 153
today if he hadn't died in 1930.

Famous for his political campaigning, Doyle wrote a justification of
Britain's role in the second Boer War of 1899-1902. He was one of many
who called for reform of the Congo Free State. He also stood for
Parliament as a Liberal Unionist (that's the party that split from the
Liberals in the 1880s in protest over the latter's support for Irish
home rule) in the early 20th Century. Doyle tried unsuccessfully to
save his friend Roger Casement from being executed for his part in the
Easter Rising of 1916.

Doyle was also a staunch advodate of justice whose intervention in the
case of half-Indian lawyer George Edalji was instrumental in
establishing the UK's Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.

Following the death of his son Kingsley in the First World War, Doyle
grew depressed, eventually turning to the fad of spiritualism and its
attempts to find proof of life after death. He became a member of the
Ghost Club, an organisation devoted to the scientific study of alleged
paranormal activity.

Oh yes, and from about 1886 he also found some success as a writer of
sensationalist literature featuring a lanky detective who specialised
in solving near-impossible crimes. Though useful for his bank balance,
Doyle regarded the writing of these tales as something of a
distraction.

If you’ve been checking out the Amazon.uk free downloads chart
recently, you might have noticed the same book has been at number one
solidly for well over a week: Natural Causes, by James Oswald
(http://goo.gl/LMMW5). Looking at the synopsis and reviews on Amazon,
the book sounded great.

Here’s a taster: “Detective Inspector Anthony McLean is investigating
the discovery of a dead girl, walled up in the basement of an old
Edinburgh mansion. She has been brutally murdered, her internal organs
removed and placed around her in six preserving jars. The evidence
suggests this all happened over sixty years ago, an attempt to
re-enact an ancient ceremony that by trapping a demon in the dead
girl’s body would supposedly confer immortality on the six men who
took one of her organs each.”

Crime with a hint of the supernatural. What’s not to like, right? So I
got in touch with James via Twitter to see if I could find out more
and he told me a great story about how he came to put the book out
electronically. Here’s what he said:

“I wrote the book back in 2006 when my old friend Stuart MacBride
suggested I stop writing about dragons and try some crime. I put it in
for the 2007 Debut Dagger - and was extremely surprised when it was
short-listed. Alas, I didn't win, and the short-listing didn't really
generate the publisher interest I'd hoped. At the time I had an agent
who had taken me on for my fantasy books, and I suspect she was a bit
out of her depth trying to sell Natural Causes. We parted ways
amicably not long afterwards.

“Stuart told me to take the supernatural elements out of the stories;
Al Guthrie advised me to keep them in. Swithering back and forth
between the two meant that I've spent most of my time rewriting,
rather than trying to sell. Late last year I decided enough was enough
and decided to give the epub bandwagon a try. To say that I'm
surprised at the reception Natural Causes has got on kindle since it
went free is something of an understatement. Last time I looked, 13000
people had downloaded it in the UK and almost 5000 in the US, and all
in the last week. With a minimum of publicity too.”

Now, granted this book has been free, but 18000 downloads? That’s
great, isn’t it? Surely it shows the potential paying market James
could have for his work. It also begs the question as to why a book
with such obvious appeal that had been shortlisted for a prestigious
new writing award had such a hard time getting a publisher.

I think this is more proof of the power of ebooks to bring writers and
readers together in a way that just wasn’t possible before.

I’ll be reading James’ novel soon and will make sure to let you know
what I thought of it. In meantime, why not download it yourself? It is
free, after all…

This time lapse map of European political history is one of the coolest things I've seen on the net in weeks.

Ok, so I'm a geek.

So, somewhat slow out of the gate, I'll admit. But it's time I got on with plugging this year's Crimefest, being as I'm appearing on two author panels at the event.

Yes, that Crimefest. The one kicking off in nine days. Let's just move on, shall we? I've had stuff to do. And so have you, so don't give me that look.

Anyway, so on Friday 25th May I'm on the Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know panel, alongside fellow lovelies Michael J Malone, Helen Fitzgerald and my own Blasted Heath stablemate Douglas Lindsay. I had thought the first draft title was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but it turns out we'll actually be discussing the importance of Lord Byron's poetry to the Romantic movement, as well as to post-Enlightenment models of political liberty. I can't wait.

Moderatrix of this panel will be the very demanding and infuriatingly homework-setting Donna Moore.

If you're there and you don't want to miss it, here's the Crimefest programme.  

The following day I'm appearing on a panel called Debut Authors - An Infusion of Fresh Blood. Please note that this one starts at 9am, so I might not be at my sparkling best. As well as getting to see me again, you'll also get to see Michael J Malone again (I think he's my stalker). And as if that wasn't enough, you'll also get to see Claire McGowan, Penny Hancock and Thomas Enger. We'll all be trying to amuse, but we are tender young things so please be forgiving.

Moderator of this mousy affair will be Chris Simmons, editor of the influential Crimesquad.com review website.

Don't know if you've seen today's Google doodle celebrating Howard
Carter's birthday, but the Egyptologist would have been 138 today.

Famous for discovering the tomb of boy pharoah Tutankhamun in 1922,
Carter died of lymphoma on 2 March 1939 at the age of 64.

Was he a victim of the pharoah's curse? What do you believe? All comments
welcome...

PS. For trivia fans, 9 May is also Victory Day in Russia, when the
country celebrates the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
Today is also Europe Day, when the European Union celebrates the
founding in 1950 of its predecessor organisation the European Coal and
Steel Community.

So happy birthday Howard Carter, happy Victory Day, and happy Europe
Day. Sending a bit of celebratory cheer in the direction of the
European Union might go some way to lifting the gloom surrounding
current euro currency woes, since some commentators now predict
Greece's exit from the single currency within the next couple of
months...

Want the lowdown on how historical fiction writers do their research? How they choose their stories or flesh out their characters? Or what about how they patch up those niggling little gaps in historical knowledge?

Wonder no longer as Willian Ryan and I chat about these very things. Thanks to Mystery Tribune for posting the full version of this interview. Part one is available here, and part two here.

Read on for a taste of the full thing...

Damien: The first thing most people want to know about any kind of historical writer is what drew them to the place and time they write about. So what was it that drew you to early Soviet Russia? Do you have Russian connections?

William: I don't have any direct Russian connections although I did a fair bit of work there back in the 90s and almost went to live there in 97. The real interest came from reading Russian writers like Bulgakov, Babel and Pasternak. I suppose the question for me is how people functioned in the thirties, when the novels are set, when people faced possible arrest for the smallest of political indiscretions. I think they must have had to compartmentalize their minds– in other words people had public and private personas that could be quite different. On top of which, Korolev, my detective is still coming to terms with his experiences during the First World War and the Russian Civil War. I found that interesting about your novel, the way that the 1914-18 war was still having effects on people many years afterwards. Was that one of the things that drew you to the twenties? And why Düsseldorf in particular?

D: I wasn’t really drawn to Düsseldorf as such. Not at first. I lived in Berlin for three and a half years and that got me interested in Berlin as a setting. But I do think I was drawn to the period because of the hangover of the war. I mean, the immense loss – of people, of property, of innocence – of the First World War has passed into legend for the Brits and French. Now imagine all of that and losing the war on top, so you don't even have the salve of victory to cover all those wounds.

W: That's interesting – both Russia and Germany were losing countries (Germany having defeated Russia before its own defeat) and they both ended up with political systems which aspired to global domination. I suppose the connection is obvious.

D: Some historians now talk of the period 1914-1945 as a 20th century Thirty Years' War, like the second war was inevitable because there was so much unfinished business. Set against that, the pleasure seeking and decadence of the 20s and early 30s in Europe – and Germany in particular – takes on the atmosphere of tragedy. Frankly, that was irresistible. The fact that so many great films and paintings came out of the period didn't lessen its appeal any, either.

Common to almost all of the films and paintings we remember from the time are the themes of violence and madness, and images of serial killers abound.

This drew me to research real life killers of the time in Germany, and the most interesting case turned out to be in Düsseldorf. The crimes of Peter Kürten drew me there. When I found out that amid all the sordid details was a genuine unsolved murder of a prostitute – well, then I had my ultimate subject: the killing of Emma Gross.

W: I'm curious about that. Without giving too much away about your novel’s plot, I hope, I found Emma's murder and the way it was dealt with interesting because it seems to reflect the cheapness some people held life in during that period – and the corruption that was endemic in many countries between the wars. Is that something you wanted to show?

D: I did want to explore the nature of corruption, that’s right, but one of the points of the book is that much of what happens spins out from good intentions. I’m also not convinced that much has changed. Corruption never goes away, whether under capitalism or Communism. And in terms of cheapness of life, a murdered prostitute still gets fewer column inches than a missing school girl – or a glamor model’s breasts, for that matter. Serial killers have always been good for newspaper sales, at least from Jack the Ripper onwards. The public loves serial killers, and that’s just as true today as it’s ever been. As soon as they hit the media they become celebrities. How cheap is that?

Talking of serial killers, your debut novel The Holy Thief manages to include many of the features readers would expect of a serial killer novel, yet it remains fresh and exciting. How did you approach the serial killer angle? And, since your second novel The Bloody Meadow is not a serial killer novel, what made you decide to feature a serial killer at all?

W: I wanted to have a very strong first scene for The Holy Thief and I wanted to try and explain why someone like the killer did the things he did. That's another common theme between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia – the fact that ordinary people became brutal yet attempted to maintain normal lives away from their “work”. You read about concentration camp commanders who have these idyllic pastoral lifestyles while a few miles away half a million people are being murdered and to them it must just have been this unpleasant day job that they left behind them. They were completely divorced from morality but, at the same time, they wanted to live moral lives. Odd.

D: Very true. That’s another compelling thing about the interwar period. The world turned upside down so quickly for so many people that what was normal or acceptable changed utterly.

W: I think that's what I wanted to explore with the killer in The Holy Thief but, and it's a big but, The Holy Thief is really about Captain Korolev, the detective who does his best to uncover the truth and bring relative justice to the guilty in a state where both are in short supply. The Bloody Meadow is probably closer to a spy story in some ways but I think both novels are about an individual trying to do the right thing in a society that almost sees honesty and moral behavior as a form of rebellion.

Your detective, Klein, is a bit different but along the same lines. To me he's a tough, cynical veteran who, despite all his bravado, is an honest man and perhaps a little sentimental. Is that how you saw him? And how did you put him together as a character? And, if I can ask one last supplemental question – how did you research the minutiae of his profession? (I took some notes, I'll admit).

Well, ok. Technically, it's five magnifying glasses.

But still, here's what reviewer Michael J Malone had to say recently about my novel The Killing of Emma Gross:

"This is a book with quality written all over it – and what makes that statement more impressive is that this is Damien Seaman’s debut novel. All the elements we look for in a police procedural are there – a fascinating puzzle, a plotline that zips along and prose where not a word is wasted. To add flavour to all of that is an historical setting that is drawn with care. It is clear that Seaman carried out an impressive amount of research and he cleverly avoids the trap of loading the novel with too much detail, meaning the pace is never allowed to slow.

"From the arresting and blood-chilling beginning to the exciting conclusion, ‘The Killing of Emma Gross’ is an excellent read. Highly recommended."

Thanks to Michael for the great review. His debut crime novel 'Blood Tears' is due out soon from Five Leaves.

Meanwhile, I'd like to thank the readers who took the time to post reviews on Amazon over the last couple of months. It means a lot to get this kind of support from people who enjoy what you're doing. Here's a selection of what people have been saying:

"...a whacking good story that pulls the reader immediately into its twisty plot line. The Germany of 1929 surrounds us from the jump. The desperation, the sense that there's no peace in sight even though the war is over. The characters are edgy and smell of the corruption is everywhere. From the disgraced cop hero's less than legal actions in his tormented quest to find the true murderer to the political maneuverings of his superiors and the actions of everyone else in the book, ain't nobody walking away untouched..." A J Haynes, California.

"I must make sure not to ramble and gush, but I loved this book. Really loved it. The writing was utterly superb, and I really enjoyed reading something set outside of the USA/UK...The plot was wonderful, pacing snappy and characters brilliant....So yeah, this isn't some hard-assed review, and in a way even though the book was gritty and noir and brutal it also had a real human side to it which shone through. My only complaint is that I was kept up way too late reading it." KTK

"Thoroughly good read - particularly the additional factual stuff at the end of the book. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading about fact-based crime. The author's character building was good and the book was well interspersed with different focus levels." Helen

"I enjoyed this book I liked the style and the plot and the dark display of the characters. It even made me laugh at some parts." Amberlight, Tulsa

"I found this very clever combination of fact and fiction totally riveting...If I were able to award more than five stars to this story, I would certainly do so and I sincerely hope the author has more in a similar vein in the pipeline...I cannot recommend this highly enough and am amazed this inspired piece of writing is a debut novel!" Midnight

PS. Been a while since I posted, but for those who were concerned, don't worry. I was away in India for a while. Hence the pic.

...Or, How German Expressionism inspired my novel 'The Killing of Emma Gross'

It’s all about perception in the end.

British radio presenter Matthew Sweet once said – and I’m paraphrasing – that the trouble with historical fiction is that it’s even more ephemeral than other forms of literature because it’s just one era’s view of another; any generation writing about previous generations will pick out the themes and events that seem most pressing to it rather than the time itself. As one generation withers and dies, the next will find little of relevance in its predecessor’s view of history, rendering that view – and its products – obsolete.

Like most of what Sweet says, I wanted to disagree with it; he’s an irritating git who specializes in the trite. But this statement stayed with me. Much as I hate to admit it, he was right about this. History is the most abused discipline there is, the search for historical truth one of the most quixotic of all human studies.

It’s not real, you see. We can never know for sure, not about any of it – it’s all just guesswork.

Which is where we get back to perception. Take a look at this picture.

Belle Alliance Platz, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

It’s an Expressionist painting of a public square in Berlin. A square that used to be called Belle Alliance Platz before we bombed the shit out of it in World War II. Now it’s still a public square – albeit one built of post-war concrete rather than belle époque stone, and named Mehringplatz. When I lived in Berlin, I used to go past Mehringplatz every other day. That column and statue you see in the middle of the painting? That’s the only bit still standing today.

Here’s what Mehringplatz looks like now:

Mehringplatz today. The fountain beneath the column doesn’t work.

The point is, the first time I saw Kirchner’s painting in a museum I recognized the square despite the fact that it looks almost nothing like that now. For all its Expressionist angularity, the painting captured the place perfectly. The greatest writers alive could labour an eternity attempting a more accurate depiction with words and they could never get it the way the painting does. The painting becomes a real – a truthful – representation of the place because this is how Kirchner saw it as he was painting. His perception made it real, made it recognizable and gave it a soul. Looking in the painting, I knew this place despite never having been there as it was.

In case you were wondering, here’s what the square actually did look like around ten years before Kirchner painted it:

Belle Alliance Platz, c. 1900, probably from a picture postcard

Perception is all.

When I came to write my historical crime novel, The Killing of Emma Gross, I had a problem. I wasn’t sure how to represent my Germany – the Germany of the Weimar Republic. In the end, the very devastation of World War II made it easy for me. The Germany of 1930 no longer existed, not even materially. Whatever anyone did to resurrect it in fiction, it would be an artificial construct, a Disney version. It would be their perception of how it was, never how it really was because how it really was could never exist again. While my poor Emma Gross was a real woman killed in 1929, her murderer was never found. That was the whole reason I’d chosen her story: Because it had no conclusion beyond the one I would write.

Thus liberated, I allowed my influences to run wild: the hard boiled American literature of the time a la Dashiell Hammett, the Expressionist movies made in Germany during the period – the likes of ‘Nosferatu’ and ‘M’ and ‘Metropolis’ and ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’. All of these about voice, atmosphere and point of view. In the case of the movies, they all acknowledge the absolute power of the mind too. Take the scene in ‘M’ in which child killer Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, tips into madness as he describes the voices in his head that drive him to kill. This is a cliché now but it wasn’t in 1931. And a single viewing of ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ from 1919 is enough to see that the whole story is a warped version of reality. Madness is never far away in interwar German art, film or literature.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 1919 – or that Red Hot Chili Peppers video from 2000

Even Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel of Berlin lowlife, ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’, a montage of multiple points of view and scraps of other media such as songs and newspaper articles, is about the perception or impression of events rather than events themselves.

I used all of this, exploited it; I let the art and the movies use and exploit me. After all, in my initial villain, the real life serial killer Peter Kürten, I had a character straight out of an Expressionist movie; Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert was modeled on Kürten, however loosely and however much the movie’s director Fritz Lang half-heartedly tried to deny it at the time. Kürten was Lorre and Lorre was Kürten. Movies and history blended in my mind, became inseparable. Reality was a laughable notion, alien to the interwar tradition of European art.

Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert (or is it Peter Kürten?) in ‘M’, 1931

Only the influence of hardboiled America brought me down to earth. But this offered scant consolation beyond the risk of anachronism, of a slang that would sit uneasily in my 1930s Germany. Then I reminded myself that tone and atmosphere were everything. I began to see my novel as a translation. It didn’t matter what kind of language my characters spoke because they would be speaking German and I could translate them into any kind of English I wanted.

So I Anglicized, I Americanized, I went wild. I was looking for something that would feel real as one man’s perception of the events around him, my protagonist’s first-person hardboiled cynicism through an Expressionist filter. And hell, I even threw in a bit of throbbing Freudianism and hectoring Marxism to go with it. Authenticity. Perhaps even authenticity at the expense of history the way some readers understand it.

Because this is how Germans thought back then. Fractured, frantic, tinged with madness, full of murderous thoughts and the violence that bubbles below the surface.

Except that they didn’t. Not really. This is just another interpretation, one we love to contemplate because the violence and madness of these media help us make sense of Germany’s descent into fascism. And because the image of Liza Minnelli in the 1970s movie Cabaret is so Goddamned pervasive.

Goddamn it Liza, just give it a rest already

‘M’ and ‘Nosferatu’ and ‘Pandora’s Box’ and the others are the movies we choose to remember ahead of the more popular comedies, musicals and historical dirges that ruled the box office in reality. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and George Grosz and Otto Dix and Max Beckmann are the painters we fixate upon instead of the mainstream watercolorists that Hitler so wanted to emulate in his youth. We have invented a Weimar Germany of doomed romance and glamour because that’s the history we want.

This is how we make our history, our truth and our fiction: in the end, they are all one. And, in the end, this was how I wrote The Killing of Emma Gross.

Because it’s all about perception.

Thanks to Anthony Neil Smith who first published this post on his blog, which you can find here.

Putting the ‘literary’ in ‘literary murder’

By Lynn Shepherd

In the last few years we’ve seen conventional genres like woman’s
fiction breaking down new sub-divisions like chick lit, as well as the
emergence of whole new genres we never had before - YA being only the
most obvious. So it’s no surprise that a favourite interview question
for authors these days is ‘what genre do you write in?’

In my case the answer is ‘literary murder’. In both Murder at
Mansfield Park and Tom-All-Alone’s I take a well-known work of classic
fiction, and then weave my own murder story into it. In the first book
I did it by ‘re-imagining’ Jane Austen’s novel, and writing in in her
style; in Tom-All-Alone’s I created a standalone murder mystery that
runs in parallel with Dickens’ Bleak House, and which draws in some of
his most memorable characters.

For someone who loves classic English fiction as much as I do there’s
an enormous pleasure in engaging so closely with these wonderful
masterpieces, and I hope my readers can see how much I love these
books, and how inspired I am by them. I’ve written an academic book on
the 18th century English novel, so I do spend a huge amount of time
getting the details right – whether that’s the Regency vocabulary in
Murder at Mansfield Park, or the sordid facts of Dickens’ London in
the latest book.

Both of my novels are murder stories, but the word ‘literary’ is just
as important here. I’ve been overwhelmed with the positive response
I’ve had to both books, both from Austen and Dickens aficionados, and
from readers who’ve never read a word of either of them. But every now
and again someone says I should ‘find my own voice’ or ‘leave the
classics alone’. My answer to the first point is that while my first
novel certainly was a conscious pastiche, part of the purpose of that
book was to do exactly that, in an attempt to give Austen fans some of
the same pleasure her own books do. In Tom-All-Alone’s, by contrast,
the voice is entirely my own. I do play ventriloquist when I ‘recall
Dickens’ characters to life’ (to paraphrase a memorable phrase of his
own), but the story, and the main protagonists are all mine own, and
you don’t have to have read Bleak House to enjoy it.

As for the suggestion that I abandon the classics and just make
something up, well yes, of course I could do that if I wanted. With
my second book, I could easily have written a Victorian murder mystery
that made no reference to Dickens at all, but believe me, dear reader,
there are many dozens of writers who are already doing that, some of
them extremely well. I chose the literary angle precisely because I
couldn’t find a single novel that does what I do in Tom-All-Alone’s.
And as the Literary Review said in their review, “Spotting the
literary references adds another layer of enjoyment to what is already
an absorbing story.”

The contemporary book market is so crowded that every writer needs to
find some way to make their book stand out – some factor that makes
their novel if not unique, then at least that little bit different.
And it’s the ‘literary’ in ‘literary murder’ that does that for me.
Clearly there will always be a few people that don’t like that
approach, and they’re entitled to that view, but criticising me for
choosing it is rather like complaining about the magic in Harry
Potter. It’s the heartbeat of the genre I’ve chosen to write in, and
if the books do manage to be distinctive in any way, I think that’s
why.

Tom-All-Alone’s is published by Corsair, and will be issued in May in
the US by Random House under the title The Solitary House. You can
follow Lynn on Twitter at @Lynn_Shepherd, and her website is
www.lynn-shepherd.com.

This post is a great big thank you to all the folks who've interviewed
me about my novel The Killing of Emma Gross. It's great to get such
support from readers and writers who appreciate what you're doing.

For any new blog readers - or anyone who just happened to miss these
interviews when they were posted - here are the places you can read me
talking about myself and my book.

The most recent interview was a two-parter with crime author,
interviewer and reviewer extraordinaire Michael J Malone. Part one of
the interview is here: goo.gl/KGIqA. Part two is here: goo.gl/AwhQE.
Michael also has his first crime novel due out with Five Leaves Press,
and you can find that here: http://goo.gl/Cvr7W.

Len Wanner interviewed me at his blog The Crime of It All, and you can
find that Q&A here: http://goo.gl/IV8WU. Len is also one of the most
recent additions to the line up of my publisher Blasted Heath, with
his The Crime Interviews, Volume One. Weirdly, my Q&A with him didn't
make the cut, so I'm assuming he's just holding it back for volume
two. Obviously he doesn't want me to overshadow his interview with the
little known Ian Rankin. Here's a link to the book:
http://goo.gl/3MCgE.

Author and blogger Julie Morrigan posted a Q&A with me here: goo.gl/NQ71D.

And way back in November, the great Tony Black did my first Q&A here:
goo.gl/A0uKA. Tony's been a longstanding supporter of my work, and you
should check it his Gus Dury novels or his more recent DI Brennan
books. I would particularly recommend his Truth Lies Bleeding to
police procedural fans, while PI lovers would do well to check out
Gutted, my personal favourite of the Gus Dury series. Tony has also
become one of the most recent Blasted Heathens, and you can check out
his latest release with them here: http://goo.gl/DE6SA.>