MOTV Feature, Q&A & Excerpt at 'A Reader's Review'
Author Q&A
Tell us a little about your new book MASK OF THE VERDOY
MASK OF THE VERDOY is the first book in the period crime thriller series “The George Harley Mysteries”, set in London in the 1930s. Of course, thanks to the writings of authors such as Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham, this era has come to be regarded as the ‘Golden Age’ of British Detective Fiction; but unlike the quaint sleepy villages and sprawling country estates of the Miss Marple, Hercules Poirot and Albert Campion stories, our hero—the cockney detective George Harley—operates in the London underworld.
Why have you chosen to set the series in the 1930s?
The inter-war period—the so-called ‘Morbid Age’—has fascinated me for a while now. It was a time when people became more politicised and more unlikely to blindly accept their fate. Of course, this also meant that people began to be seduced by dangerous political ideas, such as eugenics and fascism … and we all know where that ended up. Historically I think the period has great resonance for the modern reader – with the West struggling with a global economic crisis, haunted by past military conflicts and turning to extreme politics as doom-mongers foretell the decline of civilization and the death of capitalism. Sounding familiar? But, as well as the history, I’m also a great fan of British authors from the 1930s: Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Grahame Greene, Norman Collins … I find the gritty realism that they manage to conjure truly alluring.
So, would you say that MASK OF THE VERDOY is a political book?
No, fundamentally it is a crime thriller, a ‘London noir’ novel; played out against a backdrop of smoggy alleyways, illegal gambling dens and lowlife clip-joints. Harley’s associates are the characters that populated Soho and Piccadilly in the 1930s—the Jewish gangsters, frowsy streetwalkers and streetwise conmen. But this first story sees him pitched against the sinister Sir Pelham Saint Clair and his British Brotherhood of Fascists, based loosely on the real-life Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the infamous British Blackshirts (the British Union of Fascists). Mosley was part of the nobility, a baronet and a distant relative to the Queen; he’d been an MP for both the Tory and Labour parties, and at one time was tipped as a future Prime Minister. I was keen to use this theme to drag into the light a dark period of British history that I feel has been conveniently pushed to the back of the closet in the collective memory.
What is the ‘VERDOY’ of the title?
I’m afraid I can’t reveal that – you’ll have to read the book!
There’s some great use of slang in the book, is it your own invention?
Absolutely not! I spent a great deal of time researching London in the 1930s in order to create Harley’s world, and an important part of that research was studying the authentic language of the street. I’ve pored through countless contemporary novels of the period as well as a collection of dictionaries of underworld slang (which I found fascinating) in order to employ the authentic vernacular and idioms of 1930s London. Thieves’ cant, Polari, Yiddish, rhyming slang, back slang and street argot—it’s all in there; there’s a glossary included at the back of the book, and on the website, for those who find this kind of thing as interesting as I do.
Have you begun planning the next George Harley Mystery?
Indeed! Harley will return in THE GRIMALDI VAULTS, which will be released in 2015.
Could you give us a brief outline of this second book in the series?
Well, I don’t want to give too much away, but THE GRIMALDI VAULTS sees Harley’s old nemesis, the serial killer Osbert Morkens, make a reappearance. There’s a child abduction … a dismembered body in a suitcase … Occultist rituals … Weimar cabaret artists … basically, it isn’t long before Harley is once again trawling the capital’s seedy nightspots searching for clues to another sinister mystery. A little more detail can be found on the website.
Before you go could you describe George Harley to us in one sentence?
Harley is a bolshie, auto-didactic, Gold Flake-smoking, Norton CS1-riding, jazz-loving, brass knuckle-wielding, cockney private detective with a heart of gold, a one-eyed tomcat, and a serious chip on his shoulder.
For the full article follow this link: MOTV Feature at 'A Reader's Review'
