Last week I was telling you a little more about my current work in progress, but not the story and not the overall plan. Well, here’s a little more.

I am now up to 45,000 words of a first draft, which, in my usual terms, is approaching a halfway twist. I am aiming for 100,000 words as a benchmark length, and I set that length as a control mechanism; without it, I’d ramble on forever. I have introduced several new characters, some who will appear in this novel only, and some who will stay, because I intend this to be the first book in a new series. As the name of this series will be ‘The Merrit Brothers Mysteries’, there are no prizes for guessing who it’s about or what line of work they are in. I’m sticking with mysteries and a central cast of (mostly) gay characters. I intend to include some MM romance, bromance, bonding, and relationships as my core emotional throughlines, and mysteries based on real events, people or situations from the past, and the headquarters for all of this is still in London.

However, it is a London of 1904, and much has happened in the ten years since Jack and Wil’s fate was sealed at the end of The Delamere Dilemma.

You want to know which characters are returning, and I hope you will want to know what has happened to the others. As there were nine or ten central characters at Delamere House (including one woman and a horse), I have a pool to choose from, but sadly, and realistically, not all of them made it through into the 20th century. More about them will be revealed as the series progresses.

Already, the Merrit world has expanded. In June 1904, they are working out of two buildings they own outright in Bedford Place, just off Bloomsbury Square, and these buildings are inspired by real properties such as these:

Of course, the motorcars by then appearing on the streets looked nothing like these I found on Google Maps, so ignore them. One of these buildings (right) contains a basement for some domestic staff who will end up doing a little more than running the house; then the ground floor houses Jack Merrit’s study, the offices of his assistant and secretarial team etc., while the first floor is where the detectives and their support staff work, including a new legal genius, a woman based on Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to pass the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) exam at Oxford University in 1892. My character, Cornelia Davar, is the second woman to pass such a degree, but she’s working for Jack because women could not practice law in England until after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919. The upper floors are where Jack now lives, but he doesn’t live alone; he shares a large apartment with Simeon Felman.

Next door in building number two, we have Will Merrit living on the top floor (currently alone and quite happy with that, thank you), while below him lives a character informally voted one of my readers’ favourites, Ben Baxter. The ground and middle floors are entirely given over to Will’s library and study, and the quarters of his librarian, and the basement floor is, again, a mix of domestic staff and an overflow for the archives.

Between the two buildings is another, although it was originally part of one of the houses. It mainly contains what they are calling the forensics department; the science labs and so on. We’ve not needed them yet, so I can’t tell you who is in there. I don’t want to overload the first book with too much background and explanation; that will all come as we go along.

But we also have new characters, and here’s a made-up image of one of them, which is based on an actual photo of an 18-year-old Londoner.

That’s all I want to tell you right now, but as the weeks go on and the new world takes shape, I’ll let you know more. I will add, though, as we’re talking about characters previously met, that a few others have already been mentioned, one has made a ‘guest appearance ’, and another I have plans for in Act Three of the book. For now, I must get on with the midway twist and the ending of Act Two.

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