Right on the Nose

Today is the publication date of my latest book, Steel Witches. That’s a point in a writer’s life when you try to stop for a few minutes and think--why the hell did I write this book? I mean, I had a contract with a publisher and all the rest of it, but why this book? Why did I set it in winter, not summer? Why did I move my investigator, Tom Fletcher, from being a successful cop in Book 1 to being a struggling private eye in this, Book 2?

I think there’s a risk, if you’re writing a series of novels, that things will get a bit familiar. I wanted this series to follow Tom Fletcher through a succession of calamitous discoveries about himself, his family, and the society around him. That being the case, I kind of wanted to strip him of the material things he’s built up at each stage--the things that people hang onto for comfort--to make these discoveries especially tough for him. So he’s lost the security of his police role, and the sense of family that went with that, and is out on his own as a P.I.

That change enabled me also to move onto a new “first page concept” for the type of crime book this is (Corn Dolls was “copper walks into a suspicious village”; this book is “P.I. is asked to find missing blonde”; Book 3 will be a different concept again--“innocent bystander stumbles across conspiracy, has to fight back to save himself”). I tried to highlight the difference further by moving from a hot summer to an extreme winter.

So what is Fletcher facing this time out? Well, I’ve always wanted to write a story featuring some of the girls that American pilots used to paint on their planes during World War II (called “Nose Art” by the crews). They’re so poignant, so fragile-looking, that I felt there must be an interesting background to many of them. That fitted in well with Fletcher, as his home city of Cambridge is surrounded by the remains of American airbases left over from the war. And I wanted a conspiracy that went back not only to the war, but beyond that--the kind of centuries-old grudge that’s waiting to be settled, getting more intense all the time. I noticed that many of the Nose Art girls were shown as witches, casting spells and riding broomsticks. That gave me the idea for the key to the book: that the background story to some of these girls is actually about witchcraft, and the ruthless suppression of witches that took place--hey, that’s lucky--around the Cambridge area 300 years ago. That meant I could build the story up in three layers: a 17th-century witch-hunt; a mystery left over from the war; and Fletcher here and now trying to understand how members of his family are involved with the whole thing.

Oh, and to any other writers who have a new book coming out today--the best of luck!