A FEW WORDS FROM BEN…

A quick word about causality and how it pertains to how books get written or at least how my books get written with reference to the soon to be published novella The Masquerades Of Spring.

I’m aiming for this to be spoiler free so it will get a bit vague* – you have been warned.

Every story starts somewhere although occasionally, like with the original Rivers of London, they can start from several somewheres simultaneously. With Masquerades the beginning was straight forward.

I wanted to do four novellas, each one featuring a character from the world of Rivers of London. Because I wasn’t sure that SubPress or Orion would go for four novellas I gave them a spurious thematic unity to make it easier to bundle them as a collection. Hence the seasons of the year – spring, summer, autumn, winter.

The four characters were – Tobias Winter, Abigail, Nightingale and Agent Reynolds. Abigail had to be the summer because the story is set while Peter is not around to interfere. I wanted some of that isolated small town American action for Reynolds, so she got the winter. Somebody put me onto the importance of the German grape harvest in the autumn so that left the spring for Nightingale.

Now it came to my attention, via listening to Stephen Fry’s narration of the Jeeves and Wooster books, that Peter’s pattern of narration is very similar, at its core, as Bertie Wooster’s. The same long sentences with meandering clauses, the deliberate under and over statements and the constant references to half-remembered bits of culture.

So, I conceived of Augustus Berrycloth-Young, a near contemporary of Thomas Nightingale, a fellow graduate of Casterbrook and literary cousin of Bertie Wooster. Into this man’s blameless life would come Thomas Nightingale like a carelessly thrown brick in the glassware section of Lillywhites.

I chose New York over London because I thought it would be fun and there’s a lot of books and research material available about that city in the 1920s.

And it was that research that led me, inevitably, to the Harlem Renaissance and from there to… well that would be spoilers. Let’s just say that the Masquerades in the title have a multitude of meanings.

So, in September a Nightingale sings in Washington Square – although to be honest – he doesn’t sing.

*And rambling. It’s the house style and can’t be helped.