Blackstone Fell

Blackstone Fell is the third in a series about a character called Rachel Savernake, who denies being a detective, but is within the tradition of the great detective in some ways. She’s got a sidekick, a Doctor Watson figure called Jacob, who is a journalist and very impetuous and naïve. He gets into a lot of difficult situations. Rachel is enigmatic and mysterious, and very ruthless too, it must be said. She’s a complex character.

What I’m trying to do in that series is to write books that feel as though they were written in the period. I do a lot of research to try to make sure that they have that authentic feel. They have a lot of golden age tropes, but I’m writing in the 21st century. These are not pastiches, they’re not an attempt to write Agatha Christie, they’re an attempt to do something different with those ideas about society, about human nature, about character. The settings are important, too. I’m trying to take those ideas and use the freedom that writers have today—which is a different sort of freedom from writers of the 20s and 30s—to write stories that are a bit quirky, a bit different but which, nevertheless, fall broadly within that great tradition. They are quite dark, but they’re also meant to be fun and entertaining, and to offer a genuine mystery to be solved. So with this book, Blackstone Fell, and the last one, Mortmain Hall, there’s a cluefinder at the end, which is something that some of the books of the 20s and 30s used to have. The author puts clues at the end of the book that the reader may or may not have picked up in the text. You’re demonstrating that you’ve played fair, which was very important in the golden age.

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