One of the things I love about writing is the research that goes into it. how often have we heard people say, ‘Write about what you know?’ The other day, I heard someone admit that she couldn’t write a book about XYZ because she knew nothing about XYZ and had never experienced it. Well, I’ve never walked through a London sewer in 1893, but I managed to get a few pages down about the experience. How? By researching.
Researching Matters
Of course, you can write about what you don’t know. You just have to do one of two things:
- Research it until you do know
- Imagine it
The end result should be a mixture of the two, with the researched information truthfully reimagined.
As an example, this week, I sat down to write chapter 11 of ‘Snapshot’ (working title). In this sequence, two of my detectives meet Doctor Markland in a laboratory at the London Hospital, now the Royal London Hospital. (That was my first fact check/research. What was the hospital called in 1893?) The detectives were there to test some soil and other samples with the madcap but brilliant doctor, and I wanted things to be as authentic as possible. So, how would a chemist or pathologist test soil samples and flesh samples to discover if the soil could have decomposed a body rapidly, and how would they have done it in 1893?
And away we go…
Here’s an edited down sample from the chapter to whet your appetite:
‘Beneath the sink, you will find a small box with a Mackie’s label and a bottle of Hills and Underwood’s. Bring them forth…’
‘That be Mackie’s baking soda, be that.’
‘I know. Not to be confused with arsenic, as so often happens. There was a case last year when a man mistook one for the other with not very pleasant results.’
‘Oh? Would it make him sick, Sir?’
‘Made him dead, Mr Maddiver. This was in Lanark, so it wasn’t a great sensation, but the man was a baker which rather worried the town. I don’t suppose they bought bread from him after that.’
‘Not if he were dead, Doctor.’
‘A very good point…’
‘Your education continues,’ Markland said, waving Ned to his side, and showing him a white powder. ‘What we have here is a mixture of sodium, oxygen and hydrogen otherwise known as sodium hydroxide. Do not touch, and certainly do not do as an unfortunate boy of eleven did recently, and drink it. Poor lad. Mind you, he lived in Liverpool, so… Worse, was the man who, last October, fell into a boiling vat of the stuff.’
‘You be saying the man was two weeks dead when someone then poured caustic soda over his face?’
‘I be saying just that, me hearty,’ the doctor joked in a bad West Country accent.
Ned stared at him, for a second and said, ‘That’s not funny.’
And so on. The point is, I had no idea you could test for alkali and acid by using baking soda and vinegar, but then, unlike my brother, I am not a chemist. As for the chemical makeup of caustic soda and whether you could use it to disfigure a dead body so no-one could see the face… Apparently yes, you can.
Btw., the tragic cases Markland mentioned were cases from 1892 that I found in the national newspapers.
Other, less gruesome things I have been investigating this week include the Zoka Detective Camera Will Merrit could have bought for 12/6.
Then, there was the Nurenburg Pocket Timepiece that could be bought for 2S 6D. (Two shillings and sixpence, or half a crown, or 30 pennies, roughly £10.26 in today’s money according to a converter site.)
Just a few of the things I have been looking at as I prepare the first draft of Delamere Six. It’s all in the research!
This month’s Promo
As usual, I have a few promo pages to share with you this month, and today, I’m featuring Mayhem & Motives, Mystery, Thriller and Suspense reads available on Kindle, Unlimited, Kobo and other platforms depending on the book. There are loads of titles to browse including three of my own, and the novels are varied in time and place.
