How many times a week do you put your life in the hands of a cook you don’t know at all? Perhaps too often to count, in our restaurant-obsessed culture. The idea of a malevolent cook hidden down in the depths of the kitchen has always struck me as a frightening one. 

As Grace, one of the narrators of A Taste for Nightshade, says: “Do you honestly know whose fingers touched your food? Do you give a moment’s attention to the mind that devised its method and ingredients?”

Grace’s adversary is a sinister cook who arrived in my head when my husband and I lived for nearly two years in New Zealand. When the Christchurch earthquake struck in 2011, my son Chris and his partner were working in the city and, though shocked and homeless, were thankfully unharmed. After a few frantic months, my husband and I joined them by way of a house-swap in a tiny town on the remote East Cape. By then I had news from my agent that my debut novel, An Appetite for Violets, was to be published, and she needed an idea for a second book. In my debut, I had written about a feisty, recipe-mad cook caught up in a murderous journey across 18th-century Europe. My research had led me to cross Europe, peruse recipe archives and cook historic food in archaic kitchens. Now I stared out across the wild Pacific and wondered what to write next.

I grew curious about what life must have been like on that isolated shore a few hundred years ago. Out across the Tasman Sea, the year 1788 had witnessed a remarkable experiment: the transplantation of Britons into the upside-down seasons and harsh emptiness of what we now call Australia. To clear overcrowded British prisons, 11 ships had sailed to Sydney Cove, carrying more than 1,000 convicts, marines and seamen. I was especially intrigued by Mary Broad, a Cornishwoman who escaped from Sydney’s prison colony by boat and eventually returned to England.

But what if a storm had sent the escapees’ boat straight to where I stood in New Zealand? My -adopted town had been settled by Maori, a warrior-like people with rich mythologies and customs. Early contacts between Maori and European visitors had varied from friendly trading to violent attacks by both sides. A small number of European women were captured by Maori, and these harrowing accounts of lives forever changed were another influence on A Taste for Nightshade.

Returning to England as a confidence trickster known as “Peg,” my devious cook whips up puddings, trifles and cakes for the sweetest of sweet tooths, but she secretly compiles remedies and aphrodisiacs to unleash a campaign of revenge. Wanting each chapter to be headed by an authentic recipe, I searched the archives until realization dawned that these would not have been written down. Instead I found remedies such as soporific Poppy Drops, with their hint of arcane knowledge, and Twilight Sleep, narcotic herbs once used by women in childbirth. On my travels I also sampled Maori dishes cooked in a hot-stone hangi pit, grubs, sea snails, crocodile and kangaroo. Though never quite poisoned, my over-enthusiasm for sea-fresh fish soon made me sick from some unknown toxin that no doubt lurked in crustacean shells. 

Nevertheless, most of A Taste for Nightshade is set in my homeland setting of the Yorkshire moors, the shops and assemblies of York and London’s Golden Square. Like many migrants I felt like two people: the new adaptor trying to learn and cope, and the old self haunted by thoughts of “home” far across the globe. Reflecting this split, I wrote alternate chapters in the voices of my two main characters and developed sympathies for both women. By the end of the novel, I struggled over who should prevail: sensitive but privileged Grace, or Peg, the eternal underdog trying to claw out a decent life by means of her wits.

In 2014 we were happy to return to England for the launch of An Appetite for Violets. When I started writing culinary mysteries, I had learned Georgian cookery with renowned food historian Ivan Day and was keen to return to his Cumbrian farm to learn advanced sugarwork. I have also tried historic re-enactment to familiarize myself with a tinderbox, write with a quill, pluck poultry and cook on a fire. Not all of my cookery has worked out—however long I boiled wheat frumenty, it was always as hard as pebbles!

Now I have become fascinated by tiny sugar ornaments, such as a doll-sized bed to be placed on a bride-cake and a tiny cradle and swaddled baby. Just as we might treasure the cake topper from a wedding or christening cake, these were powerfully symbolic foods, beautiful but also fragile, lifeless and ultimately edible.

I still love the poetry of historic recipes, but this time I wanted to tell a different, darker truth—about quackery, seduction and taboo foods, and the extraordinary trust we reveal when we eat food made by a stranger’s hand.

Martine Bailey combines 18th-century recipes, clever mystery and thrilling historical detail in A Taste for Nightshade. After young criminal Mary Jebb is condemned to seven years of transportation to Australia, she vows to seek revenge on Michael Croxon, the man who sent her there. When Mary returns to England, she is hired as a cook by Michael’s naïve wife, Grace, which sets into motion an entertaining game of double-dealings and fraud. Bailey lives in Cheshire, England.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On November 11, 1918, world leaders signed the armistice ending World War I and its four years of gruesome conflict. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the armistice, Anna Lee Huber shares a look behind the latest installment of her delightful Verity Kent historical mystery series, Treacherous Is the Night.

My fascination with World War I began because it seemed to be the war that always got skimmed over in History class. Not on purpose, I’m sure, but when the school year was winding down, and our class had only just begun to crack our books open to the 20th century, the First World War tended to get reduced to a blip in time in order to get to the Second. It was like fast-forwarding to the end of a movie, ignoring the plot twists that had gotten the characters to that point in the first place.

But I wanted to know about the people. I wanted to understand how the war had affected the hundreds of thousands of people who had fought and died and struggled through the first modern worldwide conflict. It seemed to me they deserved more than to have their lives reduced to such sparse facts as the assassination of an archduke and a short description of trench warfare in a Western Civilization class.

The truth is, it’s all too easy to reduce an era in history to just a set of numbers and dates and a few names and places. To ignore the humanity of millions of individuals. But when I look at history, I see people. I see their hopes and dreams. I see their struggles and losses. Sometimes they triumph, sometimes they fail, but always there is the wishing, the wanting, the striving.

But World War I crushed so much of that. It extinguished the hope, or reduced it to a bare flicker. It left its survivors wandering and lost, searching and sometimes failing to find something to give their lives meaning. Or at least to distract them from the pain for just a little while. It’s no wonder they’re called the Lost Generation, and not just because of the unimaginable number of casualties stolen from their ranks.

I began writing my Verity Kent series to try to better understand this generation, to explore who they were and what it would have been like to live through such a horrendous conflict. To have survived, and yet not know how to move on and rebuild their lives, or even dare to hope again. But rather than a soldier, I wanted to do so from the perspective a woman, one who had witnessed both sides. A woman who had become a young war bride just days before her beloved husband left to fight on the Western Front, leaving her to sit anxiously at home waiting for him. But also a woman who had decided to do her bit, unwittingly finding a position in military intelligence—one of the few agencies that would hire a married woman—and discovering she was good at it. A woman who could move about London as one of the thousands of wives carrying on while their husbands fought, but also found herself undertaking increasingly dangerous missions at home, near the front and even within the German-occupied territories.

I wanted to grapple with what it was like for the thousands of women employed in various capacities by the British intelligence agencies to serve their country in secret, and then when the war was over to be demobilized and told to never speak of it again. To be so tremendously useful and then suddenly not. Not to mention the impact this had on their relationships with their families, friends and spouses. What was it like to be reunited with a man you had been largely separated from for four long years, a man who had been through the hellish experience of trench warfare? How did such a marriage survive when they’d both been forbidden to speak of their years of service, to share what had become such an essential part of who they were?

On the centennial of the armistice for World War I, which will take place on November 11th at 11 a.m.—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—I’ll be thinking of all those men and women. I’ll be thinking of those who died, of those who served, of those whose contributions and sacrifices were barely acknowledged. But most of all I’ll be thinking of those who survived, but whose lives were irreparably impacted—the returning soldiers, the wives and fiancés, the children. I hope you’ll join me in observing two minutes of silence to honor all those lives, as well as our veterans.

An effervescent, whip-smart historical mystery, The Right Sort of Man begins as World War II ends and the British people are ready to get back to normal. Author Allison Montclair shares why postwar London was the perfect setting for her new series.

I have embarked upon what, with luck, will be a long and entertaining journey. I have launched a new historical mystery series into existence, starting with The Right Sort of Man, following the adventures of Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge, two determined young women who have started a marriage bureau in the turmoil of post-WWII London.

To be a historical fiction writer is to live in terror. People are fiercely possessive of their history. There are tiny little fiefdoms over which obscure academic wars are forever being waged. Pick the smallest plot of dirt you can find on the globe and the smallest sliver of time it passes through, and you will find that you have stumbled into several competing dissertations, and all of these people know far more about the subject than you do, unless you happen to be one of these current or future Ph.D.s who dabbles in fiction-writing on the side.

I am not an academic, thank goodness. I once attended a history conference that had the very democratic thought of including both academic and popular topics. Imagine middle-aged scholars of the Middle Ages milling about with fans of Middle Earth, and you’ll have the general idea. I had to present a paper on a topic related to a novel I was working on, and I was quite nervous, figuring that I was going to be surrounded by people who spoke Old English and ecclesiastical Latin at the table. I was sitting in the communal lunchroom opposite an intense young woman, bemoaning my trepidation over trying to sound knowledgeable in front of people who actually were, and she glared at me and snapped, “Well, at least your career doesn’t depend on it.”

Well, yes and no. I may not be an academic, but I feel I have an obligation as a creator of worlds to Get Things Right. And that’s what I enjoy about writing historical fiction. I have, as Douglas Adams once wrote, “endless fun doing all the little fiddly bits around the fjords.” I come across countless obscure nuggets of information or long–discarded bits of slang that have triggered plot points, dialogue or random thoughts for the characters.

The Right Sort of Man began as a suggestion from Keith Kahla, my editor at Minotaur. He had come across a book about an actual London marriage bureau that was started by two women in 1939 and thought it might be a fun milieu for me to play with. Iris and Gwen sprang into my mind fully formed on the ride home from that meeting and immediately began talking to each other (Iris more rapidly), always a hopeful sign for a new project, but the real work lay ahead of me.

I moved the setting to the postwar period for various reasons. The principal one was that I did not want to write a wartime novel, and postwar London was a fascinating place. The city was recovering from the Blitz; a Labour government was in place; rationing was still in effect; a young princess was being courted by the man she would eventually marry; and the Cold War, the Nuclear Age and television were all set to change the world as we know it.

And it was a fascinating time to be a woman. Women had been given opportunities in wartime that they would not have had otherwise. The postwar demobilization drove many of them back to a prewar existence—but not all of them, and many seeds were planted that would change their roles in British society.

Fortunately, there is ample documentation of these changes available to the modern researcher. I am of the generation that used microfilm readers, and this dormant skill was revived as I spooled through The Times, scanning the daily events for each month I was re–creating. (It’s a speedier process than you would expect, as newsprint rationing restricted the daily papers to eight to 10 pages.) Both stories and adverts were mined. Newsreel footage from the period is accessible on the internet, and of course, there are books. Of particular use were the oral histories of life in the Blitz compiled by the Mass Observation Project, as well as books by Anne de Courcy, whose interviews of women in The Last Season and Debs at War were a gold mine of information.

The second book is written, I’m glad to report, and I am once again off to the libraries, my happy places, to dive into research for the third. I will resurface, gasping, new facts still wriggling in my teeth, and will see what they jog loose in my brain. I am as interested to see what it will be as you are.

Allison Montclair is the pseudonym for a lifelong lover of whodunits and thrillers. She delights in taking real details from the past and weaving them into her novels, just as she does in The Right Sort of Man, her debut historical mystery.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Right Sort of Man.

Elsa Hart’s new historical mystery, The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, takes place in the competitive, high-class and high-stakes arena of Enlightenment-era collectors: wealthy men fascinated by the new science of naturalism who spent fortunes to acquire samples of flora, fauna and minerals from around the world. In this essay, she shares why this world made the perfect setting for a murder mystery.

Picture a tourist at the end of an overscheduled afternoon, limping from a blister on a sandaled heel (the dictionary at the end of the guidebook doesn’t include the word for bandage), sweating into clothes that have stretched out after days of wear, determined to cram one more experience into an overfull mind before the sites close. This is how I imagine the Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm when, on a tour of England in 1758, he visited the home of the collector Hans Sloane. Kalm poured his impressions of the day into a rapturous account of insects preserved in glass boxes, rare books lining walls from floor to ceiling, gemstones arranged in drawers and numerous objects from mummies to corals to snuffboxes. He lamented that he hadn’t had enough time to see everything.

In the early 18th century, before public museums became national projects in England, private collections like that of Hans Sloane were popular among those who could afford them. English ships were sailing ever farther from English shores and returning with plants, animals and objects never before seen on the British Isles. These same ships transported enslaved people and advanced colonial agendas across the world. In addition, profits from slavery contributed to the wealth that enabled collectors to amass as much as they did. Hans Sloane, for example, married into a fortune made from sugar plantations in Jamaica. Over the centuries, many of the objects from these collections have been lost or destroyed, but those that remain carry a legacy of exploitation and cruelty with which the museums and educational institutions that display them must reckon.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

Imagine a cabinet of curiosities and you may think of occult amulets and toothy skulls believed to be those of ancient dragons. The collectors of the early 1700s were still attracted to objects that provoked wonder and suggested forbidden magic, but after a century of turmoil in England, collections were beginning to serve a new purpose. To some thinkers of the time, they offered a means of putting the world in order. When the Scottish ship’s surgeon James Cunningham traveled to China in 1696, he received instructions on the proper methods for collecting and preserving plants, and was asked to procure not only striking and unusual specimens, but “the most common grass, rush, moss, fern, thistles, thorns, and vilest weeds.” The organized repositories that resulted from this systematic collecting would play an essential role in modern Western scientific inquiry. The reason that Pehr Kalm didn’t have time to see the whole of Sloane’s collection was that he spent part of the afternoon at a desk, squinting through the thick glass of a specimen jar to count the scales on the belly of a snake. It was a task assigned to him by his patron, Carl Linnaeus, whose species categorizations would become the foundation of the scientific naming system used today.

My own path to the world of the 18th-century collectors began when I was doing research for my first book. The letters James Cunningham sent from China helped me conjure a fictional English botanist blundering through the Chinese borderlands. They also introduced me to the collectors who waited eagerly for Cunningham’s crates of specimens to arrive in England. These collectors and the coterie of naturalists, apothecaries, artists and charlatans in which they operated, inspired The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

I knew that I wanted to write a mystery. I have an abiding attraction to this genre that explores malevolent, chaotic, evil human impulses within a tight storytelling structure of puzzles and patterns. And my research into the lives of the collectors gave me ample material with which to build a tale of murder. The same curiosity, knowledge and dedication that inspires the best collector can become the obsessiveness, arrogance and unscrupulousness that corrupts the worst. It was a competitive community prone to feuds and betrayals. The death of one collector was an opportunity for others to scavenge an unprotected collection, and in some cases absorb it entirely into their own. It was also a controversial community. In the eyes of conservative Protestants, collecting represented an impious dedication to the vulgar and the strange. To some members of the nobility, collecting was just another tasteless attempt by the newly wealthy to rise in the ranks of society. Periwigged gentlemen complained in coffee houses, calling Sloane a “Master of Scraps” and deriding his collection as a “knickknackatory.”

In The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, the crime takes place during a tour of a collection. This was an idea that came from my research. I wondered, as I pictured the exhausted traveler Pehr Kalm tallying the scales of the cobra specimen, what a lone researcher separated from a group might have glimpsed through an open door. Perhaps he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. And as I thought about the other visitors wandering the rooms, disoriented and overwhelmed by the dense displays, I imagined how difficult it would be for them to recall the day’s order of events. What a happy circumstance for a murderer that would be.

Author photo by Virginia Harold.

In Murder in Old Bombay, debut author Nev March transports readers to 19th-century India as her sleuth, Captain Jim Agnihotri, investigates a crime inspired by a real-life mystery. In this essay, March explores how the tragic death of two Parsi women and the shadow of a mutiny loom large over her novel.

History is ever present in our lives. As a teen living in Mumbai, people sometimes asked me, “Are you Muslim?”

I’d reply, “I’m Parsi.”

“Ah!” My interlocutor’s eyes would light up with understanding.

India is a comfortable mix of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Baha'i, Zoroastrianism and more) and regional groups. Many know that Parsi Zoroastrians are descended from medieval Persian refugees who took shelter in India.

The travails of my tiny community impacted decisions both big and little. Major decisions included the expectation that girls would marry within the community. It also impacted minor decisions, like traveling alone. Among other stories, the death of the Godrej ladies in 1891 became a cautionary tale in our family.

An 1891 postcard circulated to build support for a petition to the high court shows Bacha Godrej and Pilloo Kamdin, and the Rajabai Tower where they died. Image courtesy of the author.

The well-to-do Godrej girls were sisters-in-law. The elder, Bacha Godrej, was the 20-year-old bride of 22-year-old law student Ardeshir Godrej. His 16-year-old sister, Pilloo Kamdin, was married, but had not been sent to her sasuraal (her husband’s home). That afternoon, they’d climbed 200 steps up the university clock tower. On a sunny afternoon, first Bacha, then Pilloo dropped to their deaths. An altercation was witnessed between some young men in the hour before their death, but lack of evidence led to an acquittal. With no answers, a frenzy of conjecture and outrage erupted.

For the survivors of the tragedy, life was never the same. Devastated by the loss of his bride, Ardeshir Godrej threw himself into his work and is now famous as the inventor-founder of the global conglomerate Godrej Enterprises. He did not remarry. Despite two petitions to the high court, each with tens of thousands of signatures, the mystery of Bacha's and Pilloo's deaths was never solved. While researching my novel Murder in Old Bombay, I found a letter to a newspaper editor written by that widower, Ardeshir Godrej, and resolved that this would be the inciting incident to launch my detective’s quest. As my novel opens, Captain Jim Agnihotri recuperates in a hospital bed and reads about the case in the newspapers. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he’s puzzled at the odd circumstances. When he reads widower Adi Framji’s fervent letter to the editor, he becomes determined to solve the mystery.

Thomas Henry Kavanaugh being disguised during the Siege of Lucknow, Indian Mutiny, 1857. National Army Museum, London.

Other aspects of the history of 19th-century India drove the events in my plot. Although the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny occurred 30 years before the events in my novel, that slaughter would be still in living memory at the time. In that first disorganized bid for India’s independence from Great Britain, Indian soldiers (sepoys) in Bengal, Cawanpore (now Kanpur) and Jhansi rebelled, killing many of their white officers. In response, Bombay regiments marched north to quell the rebellion. In the 1890s, the mutiny would have been vivid in people’s memory, from the burn of defeat to a confusion of divided loyalties. These simmering resentments form the backdrop of Murder in Old Bombay and influenced its plot twists.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Murder in Old Bombay.

Within my Parsi community, the ever-present danger to women became codified in that simple phrase, “Remember the Godrej girls!” a century after their deaths. It resonates even today, in the outrageously high number of crimes against women. Alas, we find that historical fiction isn’t historical at all, and may not be entirely fictional.

Hope Adams’ historical mystery, Dangerous Women, has a particularly inspired setting: the Rajah, a British transport ship carrying almost 200 female prisoners to Australia in 1841. In this essay, Adams reveals how the quilt made by the Rajah’s occupants inspired her to write her debut novel.

In 2009, I went to see an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum. It was called “Quilts,” and the Rajah Quilt, sent all the way from Australia, was hanging there among the exhibits. It’s a very beautiful piece of work. Beside it was a card detailing its history. I learned that it was made by women convicts under the guidance of a matron, Kezia Hayter. I also discovered that by the end of the three-month-long voyage, Kezia was engaged to be married to the captain of the ship, Charles Ferguson.

I could hardly believe it. If this story were invented, instead of historically true, an editor would say, “That’s too much. That’s too easily ‘happy ever after.’” I decided to write a novel about it then, astonished that it hadn’t been done before, by someone else.

I began to research the story of this voyage. I knew that men were transported to Australia and Tasmania, but did not know that since the late 18th century women had also been sent to the other side of the world.

What must such a voyage have been like? How would it be to find yourself in the middle of the ocean, far from everything you knew and were used to, separated from all those you knew and loved? The crimes that led to transportation were mostly theft, burglary, receiving stolen goods and forgery. The women who committed them often did so at the behest of men. They had scarcely any rights. They were poor for the most part and their crimes were those associated with poverty. Alongside Elizabeth Fry, the famous prison reformer, the real Kezia Hayter had worked tirelessly to improve the lot of prisoners even before she set sail on the Rajah. Her creative oversight of the work on the Rajah Quilt undoubtedly qualifies her to be thought of as an artist.

What must the women convicts’ feelings have been? How would they deal with unfamiliar companions? Who could they trust? Would they make friends? Who would take against them? All the problems experienced by any new prisoner (see “Orange is the New Black”) were going to be much harder to bear on a ship in the middle of the ocean, far away from every single thing they’d been used to.

Conditions on board the convict ships were better by the time Kezia Hayter was appointed to be matron on board the Rajah, but they were still harsh. She was to oversee the welfare of the women and one of the things she did was organize some of the convicts to make what is now known as the Rajah Quilt.

My research was helped enormously by an old school friend of mine, Carolyn Ferguson. She is an expert on the Rajah Quilt and has written extensively about it. She also showed me pictures of every single piece of fabric used in the making of the patchwork, and I’ve used word pictures of these at the top of some chapters.

This voyage of the Rajah is very well-documented. We have the captain’s log and the surgeon superintendent’s log. Kezia Hayter kept a diary. We have a list of the convict women with their names and crimes written down carefully. I have not used those names, because the descendants of these women are still living in Australia and Tasmania. The 1841 voyage of the Rajah was a very peaceful one, without much illness and only one death, from natural causes. I added a thriller element to the story to make it more suspenseful. This is a novel and not a history, so I have also changed somewhat the timeline of the romance between Kezia Hayter and Charles Ferguson.

The idea that more people will learn about Kezia and the others who made the Rajah Quilt by reading Dangerous Women gives me enormous satisfaction. I really hope everyone enjoys it.

Author photo © Hope Adams.

Anna Lee Huber always knew that her Lady Darby mysteries, which are set in the 1830s, would eventually reach the cholera epidemic of 1832. What she couldn’t have known was that she’d be writing A Wicked Conceit, in which sleuth Kiera Darby must solve a series of crimes in a disease-stricken Edinburgh, while the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting Huber’s own life.

Illness is nothing new, and neither are epidemics, for that matter. Yet very few of us living in the developed world have experienced a pandemic. We’ve read about them in history books, but we haven’t experienced the strain and uncertainty and immediacy of dealing with one—until now. 

When I first began writing the Lady Darby mysteries and decided to set the first book in August of 1830, I always hoped the series would last long enough for the characters to reach the year 1832. But while I was aware that my characters would eventually have to wrangle with the cholera epidemic that struck Britain beginning in late 1831, I had no idea I would be writing about it while enduring a new pandemic in our time—nor could I have predicted how my own personal experience with a pandemic would inform not only my understanding of the past but also our present predicament.

First I had to confront the methods used for controlling a pandemic and treating disease in 1832 and how they differ from those we utilize today. Our scientific and medical knowledge has progressed immensely in 188 years. For one, we now understand that viruses and infections like cholera are caused by germs and not by miasmas.

In 1832, miasma theory was the predominant medical theory held by the brightest minds of the age to explain how diseases spread. The belief was that bad, noxious air emanating from things like rotting corpses, marshy land areas and other putrid matter actually released vapors that caused people to fall ill. This “influence in the atmosphere” was also believed to afflict those who had weakened themselves by exposure to certain behaviors, places or “exciting causes.” These theories promoted the idea that only people of “irregular habits” should fear diseases like cholera. So in addition to avoiding noxious air, doctors prescribed preventatives that were supposed to keep you from contracting dreaded diseases.

One of the most useful measures was the establishment of the first Central Board of Health, which was based in London with branches in other cities throughout Britain. The World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are the modern equivalents of these Boards of Health. Also, much like the regular televised coronavirus briefings held in 2020, the 1832 Central Board of Health published the Cholera Gazette to disseminate information to the public in an organized manner. Broadsides were posted that advised people of what foods to eat, how to clean themselves and their homes, and how to be mindful of the weather and the suitability of their clothing. Buildings in infected areas were even cleaned and whitewashed.

Quarantine measures were rarely recommended because cholera didn’t seem to spread by contagion but by personal contact. Contagionism was a precursor to germ theory, so it conflicted with the accepted concept of miasmatism. Quarantine was unlikely to have been effective anyway because the bacteria that causes cholera is not airborne like the virus that causes COVID-19. We now know that the reason cholera outbreaks kept recurring despite all the Central Board of Health’s efforts was that they failed to address the true source of the disease: open cesspools throughout communities.

It wasn’t until 1854, when Dr. John Snow was able to trace the source of a single cholera outbreak in London to a specific water pump, followed by a decadelong fight for germ theory to overtake miasma theory, that the real cause of cholera was pinpointed and accepted. Once significant sanitation improvements were made and uncontaminated water supplies were created, cholera became largely eradicated from many parts of the world, though areas without these two crucial elements still struggle with the disease.

While writing for an audience now familiar with the masking and social distancing protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was important to communicate the differences in methodology between the medical community of 1832 and today. However, the feelings of dread, fear and misgiving that people experience during such times of crisis were as present in the past as they are today. The desire to make sense of such a calamity, to understand its cause and to draw some sort of meaning from it, was just as strong. 

Some people in 1832 found healthy ways to grapple with these issues and emotions, while others responded with anger and vitriol. Pamphlets from the time railed against people’s sinful natures and called on the government to change laws to save people from their own iniquities, correlating the concept of contagion with the idea that cholera was divine punishment for intemperance and immorality. Others even blamed doctors for allowing or causing people to die of cholera so their bodies would be available for dissection in anatomy schools. This fear ultimately resulted in violent cholera riots throughout Britain and Europe. 

But not everything that can be gleaned from our study of past pandemics is dire or disheartening. In fact, there is great comfort to be found in realizing we have been through difficult times like this before, and we’ll get through them again. Chaos and uncertainty may reign for a time, but humanity will eventually prevail. Science and social understanding will be advanced. We’ll emerge with a better understanding of the past, and hopefully of ourselves and others. As an author, I now have a greater empathy for the characters who inhabit my pages and the misfortunes I inflict on them.

In 1942, the rights to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories passed from 20th Century Fox to Universal Studios. Rather than continue to tell the adventures of Holmes and Watson in their original Victorian setting, Universal had the unorthodox but brilliant idea to bring Holmes and Watson into then-contemporary London, which added a jolt of modernity to Conan Doyle’s work and gave the war-weary British public a chance to see the heroic detective battling the Nazis on the silver screen.

Robert J. Harris’ A Study in Crimson takes its inspiration both from those films and the original stories. The result is a World War II-era adventure in which the iconic sleuth must hunt down a copycat of Jack the Ripper. In this essay, Harris explores how this unique fusion of literature, film and history came to be.

"The name of Sherlock Holmes will always be associated with a hansom cab racing through the fog-bound streets of Victorian London—but suppose he had been born later. Just imagine if he had been there when his country most desperately needed his help."

This is how I might have introduced A Study in Crimson if the concept of Sherlock Holmes in World War II had been my own invention. But it was Universal Pictures who in 1942 brought the detective forward in time in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, the first of a classic series of 12 films starring Basil Rathbone. This was done with the full approval and support of the Conan Doyle estate. In fact, Conan Doyle’s son Adrian Conan Doyle declared this to be the best Sherlock Holmes film ever made. One might argue accordingly that these new adventures have much more of a claim to be an official part of the Holmes legacy than many of the other pastiches on the market.

All of this was in my mind when the idea occurred to me of adapting this version of the character for a novel. I grew up watching these films on television, and Basil Rathbone has always been my Sherlock Holmes, with his faithful Watson played by Nigel Bruce. Watching them in later years with my own children, I was struck by how seamlessly the transition from Victorian times to wartime London was made. This was due in great part to the fact that Rathbone and Holmes were already well established as the duo in two earlier Victorian-set movies and a very popular radio series.

In recent years, I have written three novels for younger readers in my Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries. In these, I imagine the young Conan Doyle having a series of adventures that will later inspire the creation of Sherlock Holmes. One of the most important aspects of these stories for me was that the mysteries should be worthy of the great detective himself. This naturally brought to my mind the notion of writing a Sherlock Holmes novel, but what held me back was that there are already so many Holmes pastiches out there, and that unless I had a different approach, there would be little point in my adding another.

Then one day my eye lighted upon my boxed set of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films. The producers, writers and directors of those films had managed to transfer Holmes to the 1940s while still retaining all the qualities that make him so memorable. Would it be possible, I wondered, to do the same thing in a novel?

I was very taken with the idea, but it was some weeks later before I had my plot. I was leafing through a Sherlockian biography of Holmes when I came to a chapter on Jack the Ripper. Holmes and Jack have confronted each other a number of times in books and on screen, and it occurred to me that the blacked-out streets of London provided a perfect setting for a new Ripper, one who called himself Crimson Jack. This would not only present Holmes with a worthy case but would also maintain a strong connection with the character’s Victorian roots.

I hope readers will be hugely entertained by the result, and perhaps even be ready for a further adventure.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of A Study in Crimson.