There are times when what you are writing inevitably circles back on itself. Sometimes that’s because you’re not done with a particular theme, or find some new way of expressing an old idea – or committing an old crime. In this case it’s because I’m working on the new Henry Johnstone book for Severn House. I don’t yet have a decent title for it, so it is currently just Book 10.Book 10 in the series, how did that happen?
Even more strangely, I did a rough count the other day and realise that book 50 will be published at some point this year…
The thing is though, it picks up on a story told in the first Henry Johnstone, The Murder Book. The Murder Book is set in 1928 and this is now 1931 but an enormous amount has changed for Henry in the intervening years. He has retired from the police force, on medical grounds, and is now attempting to be a private detective. It is not going well. Henry returns to the location of that first book in order to put right an injustice, he is a man on a mission and it has to be said that this is not going terribly well for him either.
This book is one I have wanted to write ever since I finished The Murder Book. I wanted to know what happened when Henry and Sergeant Hitchens had left and the community, damaged by previous events, had to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. The trouble was, I knew time had to pass for Henry and Mickey to have other adventures and the families left behind in the little Lincolnshire village also had to absorb the changes. It was not a book I could write immediately; I needed to wait.
Going back has been difficult and strange for Henry and, it’s been unexpectedly strange for me. I’ve realised that when I wrote The Murder Book, although Henry had been bumbling around the back of my brain for a while, I wasn’t sure I liked him. One of the earliest scenes I wrote, and which ended up somewhere near the middle of the book, was a view of Henry from a fairly hostile perspective. He is described as
“[…] a slender man with the head of unruly curls; one small element of unrestraint that sat at odds with the rest of him, Helen thought. His eyes were grey and stern and hard as river pebbles and the set of his mouth, half hidden beneath the fox brown moustache, was straight and tight and uncompromising.”
He definitely was uncompromising and I think I felt uncertain as to how to deal with that. It turns out I spent most of the book referring to him as “Johnston,” in the tone of some strict Victorian public school head teacher, and as though I wanted to keep a little bit of distance between me and this man. Sergeant Mickey Hitchens acted as his amanuensis, his interpreter at times, and also as the person it was much easier to like. In that role he built a bridge between the other characters and Henry and perhaps the reader and Henry. If I’m honest, then probably also the writer and Henry. Over the course of subsequent books I got to like him and that’s reflected in the fact that he more often became simply “Henry”. I have now grown rather fond of him. In book 9, I even separated the now Inspector Mickey Hitchens from Henry and allowed them to operate separately for a time. Henry, it has to be said, found that very tough.
I’m happy to have been able to go back to the village and continue the narrative. The book allows Henry, as he is now, to present a very different face to the population, and to try to set things right.
Rereading that first book also made me think about my father. Thoresway village is where he grew up and the social structures of the village, depicted in both books, reflect the stories he told me far more than I realised they did. I’m writing against a background of his time there and in another universe, he may have encountered Henry Johnstone. I’ve written about Thoresway a few times – this will be the third time in a published book; the fourth narrative will, I think, turn out to be a novella. It’s a bit weird, absolutely not crime, and I’ve no idea what I’ll do with it, but it is nagging to be finished….
It feels rather nice, in a way, to becoming home again.
Recent Comments