MISSING: ONE STORYLINE.

RHYS BOWEN:  I really enjoyed Lyn Squire's first book with a mystery about Charles Dickens. Now he moves to another prominent Victorian and a mystery surrounding Charles Darwin.  But this story did not just fall into his lap, as he explains here. Welcome Lyn:

  LYN SQUIRE:

Having proudly sent my first book off to the publisher, I was itching to get started on the next.  My protagonist, Dunston Burnett, a diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, was raring to go.  And my theme for the three-book series – the tension between Dunston’s limited sleuthing skills and the complexity of the crimes he encounters – was firmly established.  All that was missing was… the storyline.  

             I had apparently used up my inventive quota on my first book, so what was I to do?  Draw on events in your own life, you might say.  Good suggestion.  But sadly, my twenty-five years traveling the globe as a World Bank economist did not bring me into contact with a single crime scene or murder investigation, nothing to set the little grey cells churning.

             What else could I do?  Learn from the greats, you suggest.  Yes, should have thought of that.  Arthur Conon Doyle!  All those ingenious Sherlock Holmes’s stories.  He’s my man.  And there, in his autobiography, I found his advice to would-be mystery writers: The first thing is…  Aha!  Here it is… get your idea.   Yes, but how? 

Would reading everything I could about prominent figures and major events in Victorian England, the setting for my series, help?  Many books later, I was an expert on the Corn Laws, Ragged Schools, the First Boer War, and other hot topics of the nineteenth century, but otherwise still idea-free, not a spark of inspiration, nothing.

Nothing, that is, until I read a biography of Charles Darwin.  Charles Darwin?  What, you ask, can England’s foremost scientist of his day possibly have to say about murder?  As those of you who have read The Origin of Species know, the words murder, crime, victim are nowhere to be found in the book’s seven hundred pages of facts and figures.  So what help could he provide? 

A lot, as it happens.  Did you know that Darwin was bombarded with scathing reviews, blistering editorials, and crude cartoons from believers in God’s creation of man?  Could this avalanche of rage and disgust have escalated into something more malicious?   Mmm, sounds promising.  And did you know that Darwin and his wife were first cousins?  And that in the nineteenth century, offspring of such marriages were thought to suffer infertility?  Was there an idea here?  A couple denied the joy of grandchildren by some cruel tragedy?  Yes!  I finally had the pegs on which to hang my second story. 

Fatally Inferior recounts the consequences of two events: the abduction of a member of Darwin’s family, followed a few days later by a ransom demand – renounce your blasphemous theory in The Times or the hostage dies; and the death, or so it seems, of a former maid birthing a son in a London workhouse.  Apparently unrelated incidents, you might think, yet they converge in a vile act of vengeance: a hellish torture for the victim; the perfect revenge for the perpetrator.

Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but without him, the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy would never have… evolved, as the great man might say.

RHYS: Any suggestions for a juicy Victorian murder for Lyn's third book?