The Dan Foster Mysteries follow the adventures of Bow Street Runner Dan Foster from the 1790s. It’s a series that depends on a steady supply of crimes, and though I’m free to invent what I like, it’s important that those crimes are historically plausible. Many crimes no longer exist – returning from transportation, for example, or highway robbery. Where they do still exist, methods have changed: burglars don’t often have to remove shutters from windows before they can break in, and arsonists don’t rely on a tinderbox to get a fire going. That’s why many of the cases mentioned in the Dan Foster Mysteries are based on actual investigations carried out by the Bow Street Runners. In The Chiff-Chaff Club Murders: A Dan Foster Mystery Novella   (free to newsletter subscribers; see below ) I’ve used two cases. The first is based on the prosecution of thirty-eight year old Thomas Cannon and thirty-two year old James Coddington in 1808, which depended on the laws against sodomy – laws w...

The only thing the books I've written about this month have in common is that I loved them both! So from epic fantasy to grounded-in-gritty reality historical fiction, here are my thoughts on Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree and Andrew Taylor's Bleeding Heart Square . The Priory of the Orange Tree , Samantha Shannon (Bloomsbury, 2019) Fantasy fiction can demand a great deal from its readers. There’s so much information to absorb, not only getting used to new characters and their settings, but learning how their worlds work. Unfamiliar histories, mythologies, places, technologies and politics come at you from the first page. Even the characters’ names can be confusing, and it can be harder to remember made-up names than ones you’re already familiar with. Many fantasy authors get around this by using names that sound like ones we know, as Shannon has done with some of her characters – Niclays evokes Nicholas; Margret, Margaret and so on.  You have to h...