Richard James's Blog

October 20, 2021

On The Street Where You Live

A day out in London yesterday led me to visit some locations from the Bowman Of The Yard novels!


After a walk across Lincoln's Inn Fields, I found myself on Essex Street, as featured in The Phantom In The Fog, where a young Detective Sergeant Bowman accompanies Inspector Grainger to respond to reports of attacks by a strange assailant. One particular inhabitant is Anna Mortimer who, we know, is destined to become Bowman's wife...


'To protect the residents of the genteel street from the sights and sounds of the wharves and warehouses, a triumphal gateway known as Watergate had been built over the flights of stone steps down to Milford Lane and the river’s edge. From Essex Street, it was a grand affair of red brick and fluted granite columns topped with pilasters in the Corinthian style. From the riverside, it was a narrow flight of stone steps beneath a plain brick doorway. It was as if the inhabitants of the street had thrown a screen across the road to spare them from the hoi polloi.'


Essex Street acts as conduit between the River Thames and the salubrious squares and elegant architecture of Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1722, it was the location of an event that speaks to the perhaps surprising diversity of Victorian London. Following the death of a local cook, who had black skin, a funeral was held and attended by around 60 other people of African and Caribbean descent. Those who cry foul at the inclusion of anything other than white actors in their period dramas might do well to remember those who turned out to pay their respects.
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Published on October 20, 2021 02:04

February 28, 2021

The Past Brought To Life

If you're on Twitter and have any interest in history, particularly Victorian and Edwardian history, you really should be following @janeyellene, aka 'History Girl'. She posts such evocative photographs and film clips from the era, that I often expect to see one of the characters from my Bowman Of The Yard series staring back at me. Is that Robert Tompkins taking his chances in front of a rather handsome carriage on The Strand? Is George Bowman himself among the crowd beneath Holborn Viaduct?

One of my recent favourites would have to be a picture of several members of the London constabulary helping to pull a dinosaur from a lake at Crystal Palace for a spring clean in 1927. She notes, 'The dinosaur section of the park was constructed in 1853-1855 by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Queen Victoria was fascinated by them & was a frequent visitor. They can still be seen today.'

1927 is a little late for my Bowman series (although who knows what the future holds? Bowman would be an old man by then, but perhaps still active) but, often, there are images which are absolutely spot on. A few weeks ago, I noticed another picture taken outside a public house in an East End street..

'Crispin Street looking towards Spitalfields Market, London. Around 1900, photographer Horace Warner captured over two hundred startling images of children living in a rundown slum area of East London. He called them the ‘Spitalfields Nippers’.'

If you've read any of my Bowman novels or short stories, you will know that the East End is a place of special significance in Inspector Bowman's story. Indeed, The Horn Of Plenty, the pub featured in the picture, is situated just a brisk six minute walk from Hanbury Street where Bowman's wife meets her rather grisly end before the series begins. I love the way the children in the centre of the photograph seem to be jostling for the best position in the photograph while others seem caught unawares. In the meantime, London life goes on all around them.

I've found children to be useful narrative devices in my books, from Robert Tompkins who accompanies Bowman in the Hampstead Garrotting and then assists Sergeant Graves in The Phantom In The Fog, to the many urchins employed as thieves and snitches by the villains of the piece. As I turn my thoughts to the prequel series of Bowman novels (set ten years before the current '1892' series), I have a feeling I might make use of the Spitalfields Nippers...
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Published on February 28, 2021 09:03

June 20, 2020

An Extraordinary Remedy

Whilst writing the fourth book in my Bowman Of The Yard series, I've been researching the use of electric therapy in asylums (if you've been reading the novels you'll know why).

The Victorians had a fascination for the new, including the seemingly infinite uses for electricity. Appearing at the first World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace, London, in 1851, Isaac Pulvermacher's 'hydro-electric belt' soon became a talking point in fashionable drawing rooms across the world – with 50,000 people a year reportedly plugging in. It was a simple enough device comprising a belt of small batteries connected to electrodes. These in turn could be applied to any part of the body to provide a titillating electric current.

Pulvermacher's belt spawned a generation of similar devices which were soon put to use in the treatment of various ailments, most notably those of the mind. Doctor Newth of the Sussex Asylum employed a battery and some basins of acidulated water into which the patient's hands and feet were immersed. In 1873, he described the effects of the therapy upon a female patient where all else had failed.

"Case 3 - Melancholia - A.A., female, 26, single, farmer's daughter. History - has been insane for about three months, cause unknown. Bodily health fair. Mentally she seems in a state of depression with a most determined propensity to commit suicide by strangulation. Treatment - Chloral in increasing doses was given to produce sleep, and she had a Turkish bath once a week, but without any good. She broke out into a state of great excitement with violence, a fortnight after admission and endeavoured in every way to destroy herself. This endeavour was frustrated by constant watchfulness, nurses being told off to attend her night and day with orders never to leave her side for an instant. Wet-sheet packing, subcutaneous morphia, ergot and various other remedies were tried; but with the exception of some slight improvement from the packing she seemed little better. Electricity was applied 26 times, positive pole to head, negative to hand. At first, she could only bear a very few cells, six or eight, and it seemed to make her head ache; however, she was afterwards able to bear more. The result has been very satisfactory. She appears much brighter, converses rationally; employs herself skilfully in needlework; has no desire for self-destruction. Both she and her friends acknowledge the benefit that has resulted from the treatment, and she has since been discharged recovered."

In this case, as in cases even today, the stimulus of electricity applied to the patient clearly had a beneficial effect. We can only hope the same will apply to Inspector Bowman...
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Published on June 20, 2020 02:46

February 18, 2020

Where's Jack?

During a recent conversation in a Facebook writer's group, I was asked whether Jack the Ripper had any bearing on Bowman's world. In fact, I had to admit he didn't. Anyone looking for Jack the Ripper in the Bowman Of The Yard series will be disappointed. Jack casts such a long shadow in 1880's London. His first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was murdered early in the morning of August 31st, 1888. His reign of terror resulted in at least five victims (known as 'the canonical five'). The brutal nature of the murders shook the country and London in particular. So why is he nowhere mentioned in the Bowman Of The Yard series?

I decided to set my series of books four years after the Ripper murders, giving the stories, I felt, sufficient distance so that they wouldn't be mentioned. That meant I could introduce each new investigation without the reader (or indeed, the characters) thinking, 'It must be Jack the Ripper!' Secondly, I wanted to be very clear that Bowman's world is a work of fiction. Besides the odd historical character (Queen Victoria being mentioned, for example, or Sir Edward Bradford, the Scotland Yard commissioner from 1890-1903) every character and just about every event in the series is fictional.

The one exception occurs in the first book, The Head In The Ice. In the chapter where Isambard Fogg is questioned in the cells at Bow Street, he gives a list of crimes supposedly perpetrated by Jabez Kane. If memory serves, at least one of those is an actual event. If I wrote it again, I think I'd remove it. There's a danger when the real world impinges too much upon a work of fiction. It limits the imagination and, it could be argued, shows a lack of respect to the victims, even at this distance. That's not to say Jack the Ripper never existed in Bowman's world, just that perhaps it's enough that he existed in ours.
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Published on February 18, 2020 13:46 Tags: jack-the-ripper

January 11, 2020

Publish And Be Damned

It's that time again. After months of toil in the local coffee shop (writing books is an expensive habit!), the third book in the Bowman Of The Yard series is due for publication tomorrow (January 10th). It's a strange feeling. I've heard other writers liken it to children leaving the family home but (as someone who’s currently going through just that scenario) I think that’s wide of the mark. It's worse!

Why? Because I have spent the last four months alone with my book, hammering out the plot details, finessing the dialogue and developing my characters. I’ve relied on little more than my own gut instinct, my editors, proof readers and advance readers to keep me on track. Now, The Body In The Trees is ready to be bought, read and (frighteningly) judged! Of course, it was always going to happen. What’s the point of writing a book for no one to read?

To be fair, I’ve taken a bit of a risk with the third novel. Inspired by my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories where the famous sleuth leaves the dirt and smoke of the city to solve crime in the countryside, I have set my book in a typical Victorian English village. As Conan Doyle himself wrote, ‘It is my belief… that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside’. It means Bowman and Graves spend the majority of their time out of their depth from the start which, narratively, is an interesting place to be. If you have read any of my previous books, you will have in your head your own picture of Detective Inspector Bowman and perhaps even the direction his story might be heading in. I don’t think The Body In The Trees will disappoint. How can I be so sure?

Well, one advance reader emailed me to say ‘What a plot! Had me utterly gripped from the outset - a different setting but just as atmospheric and intriguing as the first two books’. And that was music to my ears. Of course, the story doesn't end there. There's one more novel to come in this series of four, and more short stories, too. We may well be over half way through Bowman’s year, but the story’s far from over...
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Published on January 11, 2020 08:45

November 26, 2019

Pounds, Shillings And Pence

Very often I have to stop and think. One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the research. I've spoken before about being lucky enough to live close to London and the streets in which my books are set. Sometimes, however, the internet is my friend.

Whilst coming to the end of the third book in the series, The Body In The Trees (due January 10th), I had cause to find out what a soldier in the army might have been paid around the middle of the nineteenth century. It's not a huge plot point by any means (no spoilers here!) but, as ever, its crucial to get the details right. It turns out that, for putting his life on the line for Queen and Country, a soldier was paid just one shilling per day.

To put that in context, a common labourer might earn three shillings per week, whilst a milk-maid might receive nine shillings. Farm hands would receive fourteen shillings a week whilst a mail coach guard could receive ten shillings per week plus tips! In contrast, a detective inspector with Scotland Yard might earn a hundred pounds a year (compared to our humble soldier's fifteen pounds) and a clerk with the Bank of England up to five hundred pounds per year!

But just what could they get for their money? Well, the average family, if they were able, might spend four shillings a week on meat alone, with two more on bread and a shilling more on vegetables. Milk might cost a penny a day and a pint of beer three and a half pence. And woe betide you if you got ill. A trip to the dentist for two fillings would set back our soldier ten shillings, more than his week's wages. And, at four pounds a pop, he certainly couldn't afford to pay for his own funeral. And remember his shilling day? Well, from that, he would be expected to pay for his daily rations, replacement clothing, damages and medical services.

Victorian England was the epitome of the unequal society, with those at the top able to enjoy the spoils of Empire, and those beneath them squabbling for the scraps. As ever when writing the Bowman Of The Yard series, I am left to ask myself; has very much changed?
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Published on November 26, 2019 11:15

October 15, 2019

Dicing With Death

You wouldn't believe the amount of people I've killed in the last six months. Purely in pursuit of a good plot, you understand. I've decapitated one young lady and hanged another. I've slit the throat of an elderly gentleman in the streets of Southwark and strangled another in the alleys of Holborn. Frankly, I dread to keep a running total of the body count (although I'm sure someone will one day). With the third book underway, I've already hanged a man from a tree, shot another in the head, drowned another in the Thames and run into another with a train. And that's all in the first twenty thousand words!

As a writer of historical detective fiction, I deal in death. But, how does that feel? Well, let's be clear, death is a terrible thing. Murder even more so. But my stories exist in an alternative universe where almost everyone who dies deserves it (and those that don't are pitied). There are some characters that I am glad to see get their comeuppance (and hopefully the reader will be, too) but crime is a nasty business, and there will always be collateral damage.

I do feel sad when I have to kill someone I like (I say have to because sometimes, narratively, there is just no other choice). There is a character in the second book, The Devil In The Dock, who I love. SPOILER ALERT! Kitty Baldwin is a delicate creature who, in spite of this, still manages to turn Sergeant Graves' head. But, the villain of the piece needed to send my detectives a message to cease their investigations, and the manner of her death seemed exactly the way they would do it. So, rest in peace, Kitty Baldwin.

Still, when it came to death in Victorian England the truth was often stranger than fiction. One of my favourite stories tells of how a jealous wife shot her husband dead when she saw him consorting with another woman. Turns out her love rival was, in fact, a tailor's mannequin. Another tells how a man was eaten from the inside by a mouse he accidentally swallowed. To save the ladies in his presence, the man caught the mouse in his hand only to have the thing scuttle up his sleeve, out the neck of his shirt and into his astonished mouth. Accidentally swallowing the creature, the man then endured a slow and painful death as reported by the Manchester Evening News; 'The mouse began to tear and bite inside the man's throat and chest, and the result was that the unfortunate fellow died after a little time in horrible agony.'

And if I put that in a book, you'd never believe me.
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Published on October 15, 2019 04:05