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...

Both of the books I've selected this month look at different societies - one imagined in the future, the other real and in the past. For fiction there's Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower , and non-fiction is City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London by Thomas Almeroth-Williams. Parable of the Sower , Octavia E Butler (Headline Publishing, 2019, first published 1993) Dystopian fiction is gloomy, isn’t it? Especially when it’s all too horribly believable. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower posits a world confronting catastrophic climate change; an equality gap which has grown to such proportions that life is a bloody battle between the hungry homeless and the fed and housed who live behind protective walls; a violent drug culture; and privatisation of just about everything. It’s the world you get if racism, inequality, capitalism, fundamentalism, gun culture, and eco crime are allowed to run rampant. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina seems to be the ...