Faber & Faber

Q. Jim and Lydia have starred in a number of your books now. Did you initially base them on real people?

Jim Stringer is a bit like me: northern, chippy, inclined to melancholia, dogged, likes pubs. In looks, Lydia owes something to a certain fairly obscure actress I’d better not name who made a big impression on me about ten years ago. Otherwise, she’s a combination of some of the more wilful and unpredictable women I know. 

Q. Unlike a lot of crime series, where the detectives refuse to age and the period remains the same, your books are moving through the early part of the twentieth century and your characters are ageing with it. Was that a conscious decision to make them more realistic in that way?

Jim had to be young and naïve in order to be taken in by the subterfuge practised on him in the first novel, The Necropolis Railway. In this book, he’s basically a gauche young trainspotter, or ‘train watcher’ as they used to say. It then began to be the idea that he would he grow up gradually in the successive books, becoming more cynical and wary, but still maintaining a boyish quality. And if Jim’s moving through time, then Lydia has to as well, which suits her anyway, since she’s ambitious and forward-looking. 

Q. The series is incredibly detailed and atmospheric. How much research about the period have you had to do for them?

A bit less with each successive book. You develop your own version of the period, accumulate a vocabulary and a range of references. I read novels from that period with plenty of demotic language: Arnold Bennett, say, or H. G. Wells; I look at old maps and old photographs. History books are very good at omitting the very thing you want to know, such as ’What did the Edwardians call ash trays?’. I might see a man with a good face pictured in an old photograph, and I’ll think: 'Right, I’ll HAVE him’, and he goes into the story. I look out for things that mark the Edwardian period out as either very different from or very similar to our own. An example of the latter is that men might call their girlfriends 'Baby’.

Q. How do you go about plotting your books - do you have all of the questions answered before you start or do you have room for improvisation as you write?

I know roughly what I want to happen. I have certain plot turning points in my mind. But characters do evolve as I write, and I might find that one of them has developed in such a way that he or she can’t be accommodated to the plot turn I’d envisaged. It turns out they wouldn’t be capable of doing what the story demands. So then the story has to change, because I put character first.

Q. Has writing these books had any unexpected consequences?

The occasional royalty cheque. ... And once, navigating through Halifax with an Edwardian street map in my hand (during research for The Blackpool Highflyer), I completely forgot about the advent of mass automotive transport, and was nearly run over.