My love affair with a decade.
It’s Woody Allen’s fault. I was a callow youth when in December 1988 the BBC screened the UK premiere of his film, Hannah and Her Sisters. In it, Michael Caine’s character falls in love with his sister-in-law, Lee (Barbara Hershey). After an ‘accidental’ meeting in a bookshop, Caine buys Hershey a book of poems by E.E. Cummings. The film cuts to later that night and Hershey, in a voiceover, reads one particular poem, somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond. She looks at Caine with tears in her eyes and it is clear that she has fallen in love with him. I fell in love too, not with Michael Caine, but with the poet who had inspired such a reaction, and E.E. Cummings became my life for the next seventeen years. I read him, found out everything there was to know about him to the extent that I devoted my doctorate to his poetry.
Cummings was a gateway to another world; my reading introduced me to the grittiness of Hemingway, the brilliance of Eliot, the decadence and magic of Fitzgerald. I emerged myself in the literature of the ’20s, reading every author I could get my hands on. Then, began to listen to early jazz, the blues, the harsh harmonies of Stravinsky, and more. I went to galleries and was buffeted by Picasso, Beckman, Munch, Dix, Cubists, Expressionists, Surrealists. I bought Art Deco designs. I couldn’t get enough of the world that they expressed and moved on to read eagerly about social conditions, Prohibition, the ‘Great Crash’, silent films, Hollywood, gangsters, and the emerging politics that would become more and more radical as the decade wore on.
What a love affair! It was magical, mysterious, harsh, and yet also felt surprisingly innocent. Broadway lights, flappers, speakeasies, and excess. And a backdrop of protests against unemployment, hunger, and poverty. A world of extremes and rapid change, one big party which could only end in catastrophe.
When I made the decision to begin to write a series of detective novels, the Captain Rider Garforth Mysteries, I knew I had to set it in the ’20s, and not just because I already done the research! The kaleidoscope of people, places, events, culture, provides an inexhaustible supply of material, the ‘roaring’ energy and excitement that I find so irresistible would surely be the same for a reader. My aim was to move my detectives around this world, to take in as much of it as possible; New York, Paris, Egypt, Monte Carlo, transatlantic liners, racing cars, and the glamour of movies and the theatre. What more could you ask for?
Another passion of mine is World War One and the decade also suited my characters; two WW1 veterans, one of whom, Rider, has been diagnosed with ‘shell-shock’. He represents the thousands of men who never really returned home, being stuck in the foul trenches, surrounded by death and suffering. It seemed right to me to juxtapose the glitz and debauchery with something real and tragic.
So come and join me in this extraordinary world.