​​My next novel features Annabel Rowe, an aspiring painter at the Slade Art School in 1875 London. Her older brother Edwin is a ne’er-do-well gambler but a brilliant painter and art restorer, and on the day he is murdered, a priceless French portrait by Boucher is stolen from his studio. Being Edwin’s closest living relative and knowledgeable about both art and auctions, Annabel convinces Inspector Matthew Hallam (readers may recall him from A Dangerous Duet) that she’s essential to his investigation.
            Regarding the making of art, I have no abilities in this direction at all. Rendered helpless at the sight of a white plate, I resorted to polka dots at those paint-your-own-pottery places where I used to take my daughter. But I do know something about the auction world, and this became one of the seeds for this novel.
            In the 1990s, I worked at Christie’s auction house in New York, back when it was still at 502 Park Avenue. On days when the weather was fair, I’d walk from my apartment on the Upper West Side across Central Park, past the store A La Vieille Russie, which always featured exquisite antiques and objets de vertu in the windows, to the employee entrance. I worked behind the scenes in the marketing department, buying advertising space for Christie’s in a broad array of magazines, newspapers, and specialty publications. And what did I have to do in order to buy effectively? I had to read about art and auctions, extraordinary collections and shocking scandals, outrageous wealth and daring thefts.
            (Insert back-of-hand-to-forehead gesture and a melodramatic sigh.)

            For the next two decades, Christie built his business. In 1778, he achieved a phenomenal and defining success with the sale of the art collection of Sir Robert Walpole to Catherine the Great of Russia for £40,000. It is now part of the Hermitage Museum collection. In 1780, George Stubbs’ painting Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, now considered a masterpiece of sporting art, sold for the first of four times at Christie’s. In 1785, Christie’s sold Samuel Johnson’s library, and in 1795 Sir Joshua Reynolds’s entire studio. Paintings purchased at Christie’s were a significant part of the original 1824 collection of the National Gallery, where Annabel takes Matthew to show him a forged painting.
            My fascination with art is partly because nearly every piece of art, and particularly it seems every painting, has a story—because often it brings together so many people and events. Take the painting of Emma, Lady Hamilton, by Elisabeth Vigeé-LeBrun, which Christie’s sold in 1801. You have Elisabeth herself—French daughter of a portraitist and a hairdresser, who entered a convent for six years, survived a wretched step-father, and had her studio seized because she was painting without a license. She painted hundreds of portraits including dozens of Marie Antoinette and her family. Then you have Emma—a beautiful model and actress and the muse for the portrait painter George Romney. Born Amy Lyon, the daughter of a blacksmith, she worked as a maid to actresses at the Drury Lane theater and also worked an attendant at the aforementioned Temple of Health and Hymen. She had several affairs with wealthy men, but she was best known, however for being the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson (yes, that Nelson). The hero of Trafalgar abandoned his wife for Emma, and when he learned about the portrait of her, he arranged to purchase it privately before it even reached the sales floor, for 300 pounds, saying, “If it had cost me 300 drops of blood I would have given it with pleasure.”  
            To me, the painting’s very frame is like a window; the captured image suggests worlds and people, their passions and stories beyond and behind what we first see.
            I realize I like the mystery of it.
 
            Check back for more blogs about the art and auction world in 1875 London.

​
 
             ​

​1. Nell’s mother Frances left home when Nell was still an infant, but Matthew was older. Do you see any signs in Nell of having been affected by this abandonment, though she doesn’t remember it? Or signs in Matthew because he does remember it? And are there elements of Nell’s relationship with Matthew that shape her other friendships, with Marceline or Dr. Everett, for example?
 
2. Mental illness was poorly understood in the 1870s in England, though some medical men and scientists were working in the emerging field. What do you make of the different explanations Dr. Everett and Peggy give for Nell’s mother’s illness? Do you see any hints outside of the two accounts about which of the two explanations is more likely? What would twenty-first century knowledge of psychology suggest? 
 
3. Music halls were a place where the lower classes came to be entertained, celebrating their own brand of bawdy, raucous humor that flew in the face of the rigid and righteous middle-class morality, epitomized in the Society for the Suppression of Vice (founded in 1787), which deplored profanity, gaming, and brothels, among other things. Do you see any similarity between the music halls and any venues or entertainment genres today?
 
4. Is character like an onion, as Stephen says to Nell toward the end? Is it something that can change over time? Do you find Jack’s account of his father’s change believable? When do you first feel you understand Stephen’s true character?  
 
5. Although many characters have experienced the pain of loss, numerous acts of kindness reverberate throughout the story. For example, Nell recalls Marceline’s early kindness to her, which is repaid by Nell’s in the alley. Do you see good and evil behaviors having a ripple effect? Why are some characters capable of kindness and others are not?
 
6. Were you surprised by the revelation about Dr. Everett and Charles Tindale? In England, homosexual acts were made a felony by the Buggery Act in 1533, under Henry VIII. The punishment was death by hanging until 1861 in England and Wales, though Scotland waited until 1887 to change it. Did you find the representation of this homosexual relationship realistic for the period? Why or why not?
 
7. What gives this novel a feeling of historical period? Why could it, or could it not, take place today?
 
8. Dr. Everett says that the piano is a “dangerous partner” for Nell. To what extent do you think Nell’s love of her piano may derive from her longing for danger? Or longing for her mother? Or another kind of longing altogether? In what ways is her dilemma about how Nell should play the piano related to the question of how she should live her life? What would Nell be like if she couldn’t play the piano?
 
9. Clearly the boys in the Fleet are being exploited; but given Jack’s comments about where many of them came from, do you find his comment that they might be better off now compelling? Do you see places where this sort of ambiguity exists in our society today?
 
10. Amalie and Nell are to some extent parallels for each other: each is talented; each comes to the Octavian with dreams. As you learned more about Amalie, were you surprised by Amalie’s past and the way Amalie has managed her life? Do you think she is happy?
 
11. Nell and Matthew's relationship mirrors Marceline and Sebastian's in some ways: Nell understands Marceline’s desire to protect her brother, and Nell’s desire to reunite Marceline with Sebastian drives the first half of the book. But how is Sebastian alike or different from Matthew? Do you think Sebastian behaves with his sister’s best interest at heart? Why or why not?
 
12. In the 1870s, Scotland Yard was not the respected division it is today, and the public didn’t necessarily trust plain-clothes detectives—a distrust that wasn’t unfounded. In fact, in 1877, two years after this novel is set, the Yard came under fire for a huge corruption scandal, and four senior detectives were put on trial, with three sentenced to prison. In investigating men in his own division, Matthew is like other courageous policemen in pop culture, from Dennis Quaid’s character Remy McSwain in The Big Easy to Steve Arnott in Line of Duty. Why do you think this is an enduring archetype?
 
 
 
 
 

So far as I can tell, I write historical mysteries for three reasons, and the first is that I get to run down the research rabbit hole. It’s nice down there, cozy and quiet, and you’re allowed to bring your coffee. And frankly, there is something that fires in my brain when I discover esoteric little tidbits of history that I can weave into my books. Like the fact that in the early 1900s, there was a doctor named Wharton Sinkler who would come to court armed with a hot poker to test railway victims’ avowed “numbness.” Or that a performer at Wilton’s Music Hall was so incensed at being heckled that he leapt off the stage and struck the man, who died(!)—and the performer was accused of murder. Or that the 1874 Pantechnicon fire in Mayfair burned for three days, destroying millions of antiques and priceless artworks. Naturally, I take some poetic license in my books—they are works of fiction, not history—but the real bits are like the mica flakes in the granite to me.
 
The second reason I write historical fiction is it satisfies my philosophical itch to resolve at the level of symbol the very real issues I see threatening today’s world. And while I don’t ever want to write a Book With A Message (ugh!), I find that if I keep a philosophical problem at a distance temporally and spatially—London 1875 is quite remote from us, after all—I can bring it close thematically, through plot and character. As a very simple example, if I think it would benefit us all to have more compassion in our world, I can experiment with what that looks like in my fiction. When Nell meets Jack’s father, Nick Drummond, she can only see what he is: sullen, vicious, and usually drunk. She cannot understand how Jack has any feelings of warmth toward him—until the end, when Jack tells her his backstory, and she at last understands him. (As Brené Brown says, it’s hard to hate someone up close.)
 
Third, and most important—and a reason hinted at in my last sentence, there—my whole narrative drive is toward the backstory, toward the forces that shape what we are today, and this structure is inherent in the mystery novel. By that I mean let's say a dead body appears on page 5. The entire rest of the book is about figuring out why and how there is a dead body on page 5, right? It’s the “before” that’s so interesting. I believe character is rooted in backstory the way I believe that real people have assumptions and behaviors that are rooted in childhood and adolescence. I care deeply about how those early acquired beliefs and ways of being shape who we are and how we behave as adults; and with their plot arcs heavily dependent on backstories, mysteries furnish a space for me to examine them.
 
I can trace my interest in backstory in part to two different jobs I had when I was in my early twenties. For two summers, I was a bartender at the airport in Rochester, New York. Truly—if you ever want to hear interesting backstories, be a bartender for a while. People’s tongues, loosened by a drink or three or five, depending on how long their flight was delayed, wagged mightily.
 
A few years later, I did door-to-door sales. Basically, I was a book peddler. One day, quite early on, I went into a store, was thrown out on my ear and told to never come back. I left, gathered up my shattered confidence, and went into the next store, where I was greeted more kindly. Then, as I went to leave she called after me: “Oh—don’t go next door. She’s going through a divorce and is in the process of losing her lease.” This operated on me like a tonic. It punctured the balloon of my narcissism, for I realized that just because I was the only one in the room, it didn’t mean her screaming had anything to do with me. But also it made me realize that she had a backstory that made her nasty screaming reasonable. And as a friend said to me once when confronting someone who was similarly unpleasant: “Happy people don’t act that way.” So whenever I encounter someone who behaves in a way that seems out of proportion to the circumstances, it raises the question: What’s the backstory? Where did all that emotion come from?
 
There you have it: quirky facts, symbolic resolutions, and backstories. They’re my jam.