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David Roberts writes...

5th October 2007

Something Wicked (to be published on 25th October) is the eighth in my Lord Edward Corinth/Verity Browne series.

In Something Wicked, Verity returns from Prague with tuberculosis. The only cure at that time is rest, fresh air, and a healthy diet. Edward's anxiety is exacerbated by the savage murder of his dentist, Eric Silver. Silver has recently confided to Edward his doubts concerning the sudden deaths of three of his elderly patients, all of whom lived near or in Henley-on-Thames. What is even odder is that all the deaths, including Silver’s, have an entomological connection. The old general drank himself to death with a fine bottle of Clos des Mouches. The explorer was stung to death by his bees and the famous gardener was poisoned with insecticide.

Edward finds a sanatorium in Henley for Verity and goes to stay with an old friend from his days in Africa who has just inherited a house on the river. From there he can keep an eye on Verity and begin his investigation.

The macabre climax comes during the Henley Royal Regatta of 1938, which many of those taking part believe will be the last regatta before a new European war breaks out.

The ninth book in the series, No More Dying, will be published in 2008 The series began with Sweet Poison set in 1935 and will end with the tenth book, Such Sweet Sorrow, set at the outbreak of war in September 1939.

Each book stands on its own but, taken as whole, the series explores the descent into war, ideals betrayed and how the fight for peace with honour was lost. In each book there's a murder - usually two! - a puzzle and a solution, but I am just as interested in the development of my two protagonists. Verity is a middle-class journalist and a woman. It was a combination that did not make for an easy life. Many young people who opposed fascism in the 1930s saw Communism as the only effective opposition to fascism but during the Spanish Civil War - the war that of conscience that divided the country, as did the Vietnam War thirty years later - Verity gradually finds that she is being used by a ruthless Stalinist dictatorship. In the end she has no option but to leave the Party in which she has invested so much but she remains a Communist at heart. Lord Edward Corinth, too, is educated in the realities of W.H. Auden's 'low, dishonest, decade' but I give him my hero George Orwell's commonsense hatred of both 'isms'.

I people my books with actual historical figures, fictional characters strongly based on 'real' people, and purely 'made-up' characters. In case all this sounds rather dour, I should add that I enjoy setting my murder mysteries against sporting backdrops such as Henley Royal Regatta, motor racing at Brooklands, polo with Lord Mountbatten and, inevitably, that most English of sporting events the village cricket match.

The 1930s are far enough away in time to be 'history' but these men and women were our grandfathers and grandmothers - they thought like us, lived and loved like us, and though their accents may have been more clipped than ours, they talked like us. And by 1937 they knew that another great European war was inevitable - a war which would, in all probability, lead to the destruction of everything they loved about
England and the British way of life. It's a tale worth the telling.

- David Roberts