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There are times when what you are writing inevitably circles back on itself. Sometimes that’s because you’re not done with a particular theme, or find some new way of expressing an old idea – or committing an old crime. In this case it’s because I’m working on the new Henry Johnstone book for Severn House. I don’t yet have a decent title for it, so it is currently just Book 10.Book 10 in the series, how did that happen?
Even more strangely, I did a rough count the other day and realise that book 50 will be published at some point this year…
The thing is though, it picks up on a story told in the first Henry Johnstone, The Murder Book. The Murder Book is set in 1928 and this is now 1931 but an enormous amount has changed for Henry in the intervening years. He has retired from the police force, on medical grounds, and is now attempting to be a private detective. It is not going well. Henry returns to the location of that first book in order to put right an injustice, he is a man on a mission and it has to be said that this is not going terribly well for him either.
This book is one I have wanted to write ever since I finished The Murder Book. I wanted to know what happened when Henry and Sergeant Hitchens had left and the community, damaged by previous events, had to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. The trouble was, I knew time had to pass for Henry and Mickey to have other adventures and the families left behind in the little Lincolnshire village also had to absorb the changes. It was not a book I could write immediately; I needed to wait.
Going back has been difficult and strange for Henry and, it’s been unexpectedly strange for me. I’ve realised that when I wrote The Murder Book, although Henry had been bumbling around the back of my brain for a while, I wasn’t sure I liked him. One of the earliest scenes I wrote, and which ended up somewhere near the middle of the book, was a view of Henry from a fairly hostile perspective. He is described as
“[…] a slender man with the head of unruly curls; one small element of unrestraint that sat at odds with the rest of him, Helen thought. His eyes were grey and stern and hard as river pebbles and the set of his mouth, half hidden beneath the fox brown moustache, was straight and tight and uncompromising.”
He definitely was uncompromising and I think I felt uncertain as to how to deal with that. It turns out I spent most of the book referring to him as “Johnston,” in the tone of some strict Victorian public school head teacher, and as though I wanted to keep a little bit of distance between me and this man. Sergeant Mickey Hitchens acted as his amanuensis, his interpreter at times, and also as the person it was much easier to like. In that role he built a bridge between the other characters and Henry and perhaps the reader and Henry. If I’m honest, then probably also the writer and Henry. Over the course of subsequent books I got to like him and that’s reflected in the fact that he more often became simply “Henry”. I have now grown rather fond of him. In book 9, I even separated the now Inspector Mickey Hitchens from Henry and allowed them to operate separately for a time. Henry, it has to be said, found that very tough.
I’m happy to have been able to go back to the village and continue the narrative. The book allows Henry, as he is now, to present a very different face to the population, and to try to set things right.
Rereading that first book also made me think about my father. Thoresway village is where he grew up and the social structures of the village, depicted in both books, reflect the stories he told me far more than I realised they did. I’m writing against a background of his time there and in another universe, he may have encountered Henry Johnstone. I’ve written about Thoresway a few times – this will be the third time in a published book; the fourth narrative will, I think, turn out to be a novella. It’s a bit weird, absolutely not crime, and I’ve no idea what I’ll do with it, but it is nagging to be finished….
It feels rather nice, in a way, to becoming home again.
I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces quite a lot lately. In part it’s because I have a story idea tumbling around in my head that has nothing to do with what I’m actually writing. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the Cosy Crime world of the Rina Martin book I’m finishing. I don’t have time to deal with this idea just now and it’s not even formed enough to shape if I did, but it seems to have been inspired by doorways and thresholds. More precisely, I think it may also have to do with the changing year and that obsession that seems to dominate social media of New Year New You…
What if this really was a liminal moment, a time when we could divide ourselves from ourselves and become something entirely else? What if we could create a doorway – not a portal; that feels wrong. I’m thinking about an actual, physical door that we could choose to step through and become another version of ourselves. How many would choose to become that social media version of self? What level of thought and planning would have to go into the process- or should it be a simple leap of faith? Would it be possible to cross back again? If so, would this be like a visit to the land of the Fey – or the universe of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War – we would return changed, time having passed and everything unrecognisable.
I recognise that this is not an original idea (but then, what really is?), but one that people have mulled over in one way or another probably forever. You step over the line, through the door, step off the path and either you or the world changes, or they both change. If we’re going to be really fanciful, the reality is I suppose that we do it all the time and perhaps never notice the choices made.
The Greeks and Romans had gods of thresholds and doorways, almost as though stepping from one room to the next or from the outside space into the domestic, or vice versa, was a liminal journey that required guardianship and assistance. Limentinus, household god of the threshold and Forculus, household god of doors and, of course, two headed Janus, particularly relevant in these cold and damp January days.
And while we’re thinking about doors and thresholds and other semi- domesticated liminal spaces, do you ever run up the stairs intending to do something or go purposefully into another room and then forget completely what you went there for?
Well, there might well be a reason for that
A team or researchers at the University of Notre Dame – Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin – found that we really do forget what we are doing when we cross a threshold. That our memories become worse when we pass through a doorway than if we walked the same distance within the same room.
Their explanation for this, they think, is that we tend to fix memory within the context of the original idea. You stand in your bedroom and think that you might like a cup of coffee. You walk downstairs and can’t recall what you were going to do because the context for the initial thought is no longer there.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51117912_Walking_through_Doorways_Causes_Forgetting_Further_Explorations
I’ve recently been rereading Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory and thinking about the techniques used to train mnemonic memory using real or imagined landscapes or memory palaces. This tendency to forget, when the context in which the memory is formed is changed seems somehow to be the obverse of that.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way that the notion of place is used as an analogue for our thoughts and feelings and emotional responses and how we might talk about being in a bad place or a good place. How, in storytelling, we might use the familiar and transform it into something ‘other’, just by changing a detail or two. Well it seems as though location, and the detail within that location might be having a more profound effect on our thought processes and our perceptions that we ever realized. The storyteller in me rather likes that but there is also something quite vertiginous about the idea. Perhaps we really do need the services of the guardians of thresholds and doorways.
And when we step out of our own places, when we cross the threshold into the outside world and travel down a particular road, what we might not think about is that we are traveling along what is essentially another liminal space. Roads are neither one thing or another. They are not a destination or a fixed location. We can stop. We can create a location on a road, we can fix it for a time, but to paraphrase Tolkien, the road goes on even when we no longer can.
Unless, of course, we choose to step through a different door.
When I was a kid our car inevitably headed east or north, into Lincolnshire or Norfolk, towards the cold grey of the North Sea. My first trip south – to sunny Bournemouth – happened when I was about two years old, so all of my memories of it are second hand. My mother had suddenly conceived the desire to learn to knit socks and was apparently stuck on how to turn the heel. What could be more obvious a solution than to hop on a coach and receive instruction from Great Aunt Jessie? Family folklore suggests that my father came home to a note on the kitchen table, telling him that his dinner was in the oven, and that we’d be back in a week or two.
I don’t recall mother ever actually knitting socks after that, though we both darned a fair few pairs. She returned to work not long after and I suspect she preferred the order and organisation of accounts and adding machines to the tangle of wool.
I had to wait quite a time for my next trip south. This time I was fifteen and stayed with family of a school friend in Cornwall and I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that the glories of the Cornish coast inspired some very romantic and anxty teenage poetry. Later, trips to Devon and Dorset with my own family- more fossils than poetry this time – cemented the fondness and when I had cause to spend a week close to Brighton, while the new Henry Johnstone was being planned, this became an obvious location for the book.
I spent a week walking the routes Henry might walk and driving the roads along which the Mickey Hitchens car chase takes place – though not at the speeds Mickey reached, especially as the first time was at night! Sergeant Tibbs’ horrified reaction definitely mirrors my own.
The walk along the Undercliff was just beginning construction when Henry and Mickey were there, but I also walked a good section of that each morning and marvelled at the open water swimmers. These hardy women turned up every day. In November.
The White Horse Hotel in Rottingdean, mentioned in the book, was demolished in the early 1930s and the present building erected in its place and I’ve got to admit that the tower like construction to one side partly inspired the shape of the eight windowed room in which Henry stays. It’s also partly inspired by a house glimpsed from a train, imposing grit stone walls broken by rather mean and narrow gothic arched windows, the solidity broken only by a strange half tower plonked on one corner, as though the architect was determined to have at least a bit of fun. It just had to turn up in a book eventually!
This Henry took me by surprise, in a way. I thought the story of Henry and Mickey Hitchens might be over after the Girl in the Yellow Dress seemed to bring things to a logical end. It would see I was wrong. I’m currently planning the next and the location of that is back where the series started, with The Murder Book. Henry returns to Lincolnshire where he has unfinished business and Mickey will continue with his training of Sergeant Bexley Tibbs. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to them next.
The new Henry Johnstone novel is published next week, on July 4th. It’s the ninth Henry! It doesn’t seem five minutes since I started them.
Henry Johnstone has retired from the police, but when he suddenly disappears his old colleague and friend, Inspector Mickey Hitchens, investigates.
December, 1930. Henry Johnstone has retired from his role as detective chief inspector at London’s Scotland Yard and is staying at the home of the late Sir Eamon Barry on the south coast, cataloguing and inventorying his extensive library. Until he suddenly – and inexplicably – vanishes.
Mickey Hitchens, Henry’s old partner-in-crime, now an inspector himself, investigates the house with his colleague, Sergeant Tibbs. The room Henry was staying in had eight unusual, curved windows, and the pair quickly uncover disturbing signs of a struggle, along with a blotter that has the name of a man who was murdered five years ago written on it. Is there a link between that case and Henry’s disappearance? Can Mickey find his friend and bring him home safely, or is it already too late?
It’s already garnered some nice reviews, including this one from Kirkus, which makes me very happy 🙂
THE ROOM WITH EIGHT WINDOWS
by Jane A. Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2023
Puzzles aplenty for coppers young and old.
A retired English policeman finds his way back into trouble in 1930.
Part of former DCI Henry Johnstone recognizes that his battered body just won’t stand up to the rigors of regular police investigations. But from his drafty room in Sir Eamon Barry’s crumbling home, where eight tall windows set in an alcove let in the worst of the wind, his new job cataloging the late scientist’s library seems hardly less strenuous than chasing down criminals. Henry is grateful to his sister, Cynthia, for having arranged his paid occupation once the injury he sustained in his last case forced his retirement. He never would’ve left without a word to Cynthia if a stranger hadn’t crashed into his dismal digs and tried to stab him while he was in his pajamas. Having fended off his attacker with a poker, Henry then disappears, leaving Cynthia no choice but to call Mickey Hitchens, Henry’s former bagman, to find her missing brother. Mickey arrives at Cynthia’s gracious home with Bexley Tibbs in tow. Now a DI himself, Mickey has been charged with whipping newly promoted sergeants into shape, and Tibbs is his latest work in progress. Fans of the Johnstone-Hitchens franchise will be amused to see Mickey struggle to fill his mentor’s shoes in his efforts to make a proper copper of the intuitive and perceptive Tibbs and in the more urgent job of locating said mentor. To find Henry, Mickey has to revisit the very cold case of Sidney Carpenter, found dead in the street in St. John’s Wood years ago outside a home whose inhabitants vanished.
Puzzles aplenty for coppers young and old.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jane-a-adams/room-eight-windows/
Earlier this year I joined the wonderful group, Mystery People, run by the equally wonderful Elizabeth Sirett.
Lizzie was really kind to me when I first started out, reviewing my first books and being so encouraging and supportive. My joining Mystery People had been delayed for far too long! but I’ve done it now and find I’m in very good company.
Mystery People put out a monthly newsletter, full of reviews, interviews and information for Crime fans. Lizzie and her team have been kind enough to review my backlist over the past few months and I am so very grateful for the thoughtful and positive comments. Reviewing is a real art and Mystery People have that art down pat – as my mother used to say….never been quite sure what it meant, but it was good!
So, if you are a fan of crime and mystery novels, enjoy good company and informed commentary, go and take a look at the Mystery People website.
And thank you again to Lizzie and her team.
I’m currently rereading The Nine tailors by Dorothy L Sayers.
I say ‘re-reading’ but it’s so long since the first time that I couldn’t really remember much of the plot apart from him crashing the car into a ditch and that complex notes on bell ringing were involved. It’s odd that I’ve not come back to it sooner because in many ways this book was pivotal in my eventually becoming a writer; it was certainly pivotal in expanding my reading.
Years and years ago, when I was still in my early teens, Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey in various TV series. At the end of The Nine Tailors, when the credits rolled, I discovered that this was based on an actual book! Imagine! – yes, I could be a bit slow, sometimes.
Our local library was in a ‘temporary building’ that had been put up when the housing estate was built in about 1947 and was presided over by a rather fearsome lady librarian. I, along with my next door neighbour’s children, had been a frequent visitor since primary school. We were trusted to get our own books, my dad’s thrillers, and their mother’s romances – also their Nan’s selection; she’d read just about anything. We usually went up to the library with Nan’s tartan shopping trolley and took turns to haul the obstreperous, wobbly wheeled creature back and forth. So, on our next visit, I asked the librarian about Sir Peter Wimsey and she pointed an imperious finger towards a shelf of yellow books in the far corner of the library.
‘Dorothy L Sayers’, she told me. ‘The gentleman in question is merely a character.’
Sayers, at that time, was published by Gollancz in their then famous yellow jackets and I’ve got to say, these yellow books were a revelation. British and American detective stories, SF, de Maupassant…Du Maurier…it was an endless, canary coloured feast and, frankly, I didn’t pay too much attention to what I borrowed, week on week. If it was yellow, it was likely to be good.
It’s strange coming back to the Nine Tailors after all this time. I’d forgotten how intricately woven it was – plot and character and landscape and bells. How wonderfully well Dorothy L Sayers had realised the fenland landscape or how much that had probably influenced the choice of location for my first novel, The Greenway, set in the flat lands of Norfolk, against those vast skies.
My only regret is that I’m not reading the book as a yellow jacketed hardback but as an e-book. But the words are the same and the memories it brings back of my fourteen year old self, off on another library adventure are very precious indeed.
For quite some time now I have wanted to write a series of books set between the two world wars. This is era and considered by most to be the golden age of crime fiction and so setting something in that period always felt a little daunting – a bit like fishing in Agatha Christie’s pond. It’s also a time when the lot was happening and so it is a fascinating era.
It was a time of great social change and upheaval and, as far as investigations were concerned, forensic science was beginning to move forward and become established in the public consciousness and the police force itself was undergoing many changes mostly to do with education and the professionalization of training.
Many of the familiar tropes of crime fiction were also established during this period. The inspector and his sergeant bag man, quite literally carrying the murder bag for example. This reflected the mentoring practices of the Metropolitan police at the time. Despite it being a practice which has long been discontinued, it is still very appealing to crime novelists and the reading and viewing public alike.
Henry Johnston is a detective chief inspector and together with his sergeant, Mickey Hitchens, makes a first appearance in The Murder Book. From the early years of the 20th century it had been an established right for any police force in the country to be able to send for a murder detective from London to assist with serious crime in the area, the logic being that there were simply more detectives in London and what training there was tended to be focused there too. This meant that a skilled resource could be sent literally anywhere in the country, a mobile cohort that in different guises has formed the model for taskforces and serious crimes units right up to the present day.
In the first outing for this pair, The Murder Book, set in the summer of 1928, Henry Johnston and Mickey Hitchens are sent to Lincolnshire to investigate a triple murder. Much of the action takes place in the lovely market town of Louth and some of it in what was my father’s village of Thoresway.
It’s funny how childhood memories infiltrate and childhood places drag you back and I spent a lot of my childhood in Lincolnshire, though the family no longer lived there having moved south after the Second World War. The strange thing was, though my parents had moved less than a hundred miles, they always felt as though they had been exiled and so we made frequent trips back.
I will leave it to one of the inhabitants of Thoresway to describe Henry Johnston. Helen, has no reason to like Henry Johnston or to wish him in her village and this is how she first sees him
Inspector Johnstone was a slender man with a head of unruly curls; one small element of unrestraint that sat at odds with the rest of him, Helen thought. His eyes were grey and stern and hard as river pebbles and the set of his mouth, half hidden beneath the fox brown moustache was straight and tight and uncompromising.
Helen’s heart sank. This was not a man who would allow Ethan any quarter. This was a man of the law; a man, she thought, who would have taken Hansen’s side even if matters had been reversed and it was Ethan lying cold.
Even though he was not a physically heavy man, Johnstone dominated her parent’s small front parlour, his assurance and authority somehow making him seem broader and taller than he really was. Despite the warmth of the evening, he wore a black coat, long and plain and tight across his back.
I will be writing more about Thoresway village and the inspiration behind the book in later blogs. It’s a location I’ve used before, in my third novel, Bird, and have also returned to in an as yet unfinished novella called The Italian Boy. It is a place that remains very close to my heart.
A Murderous Mind
I had a new book out at the end of November but other things intervened and I didn’t really get a chance to celebrate it, or to blog about it so I’m catching up now.
The book is called A Murderous Mind and is in the Naomi Blake series and it’s likely to be the last Naomi that I write for a little while though more on that in a moment.
People often ask what inspires a piece of writing what gives an author the idea for a particular story and this one was really very, very simple; I wanted to come up with a character that really scared me, that felt invulnerable and somewhat out of control. Someone who did what he did just because he wanted to, no reason no motive and a random selection of victim. Someone who could not easily be identified or caught and that no wind would want to believe was guilty anyway. I also wanted to take a look at the way that offender profiling has developed and changed in the last decade and this seemed like a good opportunity to do it. And so, a murderous mind evolved
I think that most people recognise that in our dangerous or emotionally charged or frightening situation we might resort to violence. That most of us could be pushed over our normal boundaries and in fear, or defence or simple desperation might do things that otherwise would be unnatural for us. More frightening than that is the person who kills without excuse, who does what he does – or what she does – just because they can. Just because they happen to be in the mood for committing a murder.
What if the rest of the time they were perfectly solid reliable citizens? Invisible because of their sheer visibility, because they are in a position of power, a position of strength and authority and a position of trust. Of course we’re familiar with individuals like Harold Shipman, the number of whose victims is still questioned but in cases like that we can begin to see connections. His victims were known to him. Eventually someone was going to make the leap and recognise what he was doing.
But what if there are no connections, no logical steps by which victims can be linked to their killer. What is there seems to be no link between the killer and the victims or between victims? In fact what if, for a very long time, it isn’t even realised that they have been killed by the same person? In real life and in crime fiction we’re used to talking about a modus operandi, we are used to talking about a killer’s signature, the received wisdom is that a pattern will emerge. But what happens when either that pattern is non-existent or is so widely spread that it’s not easily seen?
So those are the questions I asked when writing this book and my murderer developed in response to those questions.
And yes, he did scare me.
As I said this is likely to be the last Naomi for a little while because I’ve started a new series for Seven House. It’s rather different because it isn’t contemporary crime but is set between the two world wars and the events of the first book take place in June 1928. My new hero is a man called Henry Johnston and his Detective Chief Inspector. And there’s a lot of research involved. More of which next time.
. . He left the ridge and followed the winding rabbit path down, climbed the low fence that separated the yard from the field and crossed towards the house.
Looking up, she saw him then. She smiled, her eyes lighting with genuine pleasure and welcome, filling him with so much happiness that he could hardly bear it.
Then, slowly, reluctantly, he raised the shotgun. He could see her clearly, even glimpse the strands of grey in her soft blond hair.
He fired both barrels
Glass shattered. The woman fell.
I have a new book out today, in the Rina Martin series. The lines, above, are from the first chapter.
Books rarely take you where you expect they will, even when you think you have a basic plot figured out. Characters sometimes seem to have their own ideas about what they are going to do – or refuse to do! – and sometimes a little piece of research will strike a chord and send everything off in a new direction.
The funny thing about this book is that is really sent me not in a new direction but in a very old one and back to memories of a writer I met right back at the start of my writing career, before I was published, before I really had any idea of my writing direction.
When I first started writing, I belonged to a postal folio called SCRIBO. This was a collection of disparate writers who produced a chapter each and then posted round the group to get feedback…in the days before Internet and online forums! I still have friends made in SCRIBO and it was a fabulous way of getting opinions on my writing – I was far to shy about my work back then to have joined a face to face group!
When I came to write Forgotten Voices the media was full of remembrances for both World Wars and as the Rina Martin books are set on the south coast, an area that is replete with souvenirs of WW2 in particular, it seemed right to try and integrate some of this interest into the book.
And it also seemed like a good time to pick on some of the rather random conversations I had with Alan.
Long ago we had talked about collaborating on a book set on the island of Crete and concerning one of his SOE associates. It was a place he badly wanted to revisit – and it was a story that neither of us had the skill to write at the time or the wherewithal to do the research. We had planned to call it Searching for Irlanthos and one day….maybe….it’s something I would love to be able to do.
So, this book, as I said in the dedication, is a little something on account. Here’s to you, Alan.
I’m happy to say that this latest book has been garnering some nice reviews and comments from readers and a couple of things have really stood out for me, in those comments.
Ferryman wasn’t an easy book to write. One of the main plot arcs deals with the effects of domestic violence and the way in which the impact of that violence can ripple outward, affecting not only the next generation but also friends and associates. How do you deal with this kind of situation? How do you help? The isolation of those who suffer from domestic abuse – or any other kind of abuse, for that matter – seems to be the most difficult aspect. If you feel so alone and so helpless, how do you get the courage or the impetus to reach out. If someone is constantly telling you how useless and stupid and worthless you are then it takes a special kind of courage to escape that judgement and accept someone telling you a different story. I became very attached to some of the characters in Paying the Ferryman and I’m very happy that other people seem also to have attached themselves and to care. Maybe that concern will ripple outwards, even if that’s just in a small way.
Words can be weapons – in a positive way too.
The other issue is more of a technical one. Some one made the very thoughtful and accurate comment that my series lead, Naomi Blake, was more of an advisor or consultant in this book. And that’s true. Most of the time I write books that are part of a series but my ethos has always been that these books are often ensemble pieces with a group of characters who alternate the lead or sometimes hand that lead over to other people and act as a sort of anchor point around which the plot revolves.
Killing a Stranger, for instance, one of the Naomi Blake Series, was really very much a ‘Patrick’ book and remains one I’m really fond of. Night Vision, Secrets and Gregory’s Game introduce Gregory Mann and Nathan Crow and take the tone of the series in another direction for a while, dealing with secrets and post colonialism and spies!. I wanted to return to more domestic and intimate issues for the next and though Gregory and Nathan are still around, their role has changed. Naomi and Alec find their professional past has come back to haunt them in Paying the Ferryman and I get to explore a bit more of their back story, but the lead is taken by someone new, in the shape of D.I Steel. I like to see how my characters respond to other characters and slot into other settings. There’s a poem I love by the American poet, Billy Collins. It is called An Introduction to Poetry and it contains the lines
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want my characters to do that. I want to drop them into a situation and have them feel their way through. Looking at a narrative in this way keeps it fresh for me and I hope for the reader.
So, what next? Well, it’s Rina Martin’s turn to be dropped into a book and so far she seems to be involved in narrative that’s producing more questions than it does solutions. The plotlines are still spinning outward and my characters are still feeling around for the light switch. Actually, at the moment I’m not even sure there is a light switch. I have my doubts about there even being electricity! But that’s a feeling I’ve some to recognize at this stage of a book and I am, slowly, learning that it isn’t a cause for panic!
And I’ve been asked by a friend to compose a list of my favourite poems and as he went first, I guess I’m kind of obliged. So I think that might be the subject of the next blog. So, until then, happy reading and for all the writers out there, keep feeling for that light switch.
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