Tag: historical fiction

#GuestPost The Case of the Emigrant Niece by David Cairns of Finavon

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I’m delighted to welcome author David Cairns of Finavon to What Cathy Read Next today to talk about his latest book, The Case of the Emigrant Niece, the first in a new series of historical mysteries featuring 19th century Scottish engineer, Findo Gask. David has written a fascinating guest post about the inspiration for the book and about the ‘freedom to explore’ that writing historical fiction brings him.

The Case of the Emigrant Niece will be published as en ebook on 1st December 2022 and is available for pre-order now.

The Case of the Emigrant Niece coverAbout the Book

A multiple murderer on the loose, an inheritance stolen

Injured at the start of the Indian mutiny in 1858, Scotsman Findo Gask finds himself in Melbourne during the fabled Gold Rush where he stumbles across the mystery of a stolen inheritance. Captivated by the pretty heiress, together with his new idiosyncratic friend, Erroll Rait he begins to investigate for her, travelling back to London, Edinburgh, the Scottish highlands and then to Melbourne again, uncovering multiple murders before falling foul of a sinister plot to add himself and his client to the list of victims.

Taking readers back to the days of steam trains and clipper ships, gas-lit Edinburgh streets and the goldfields of Australia with the unravelling of a mystery and the discovery of a relentless murderer, The Case of the Emigrant Niece is a spellbinding novel that captures the imagination and transports you back to a different age.

Format: ebook (437 pages)                 Publisher: Finavon Press
Publication date: 1st December 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Pre-order/purchase link
Amazon UK
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Guest Post – The Case of the Emigrant Niece by David Cairns of Finavon

This is a story I promised to myself several years ago when I was driving from Perth (in Scotland) to Glasgow.  Swooping down the A9 into the fertile glen that Macbeth would have traversed hundreds of years earlier, I passed a signpost to Findo Gask – a small village off the A9 running by the River Earn – and the name struck me immediately as ideal for a swashbuckling hero.  A little later that month I was driving to Dundee and again was struck by a signpost (literally, not figuratively), this time to the villages of Errol and Rait.  Snap.  Another name – this time conjuring up Errol Flynn of course.  They sat at the back of my mind for several years and then, having completed my Helots’ Tale series I took the plunge and brought them to life, with Findo Gask and Erroll Rait meeting up on opposite sides of a cricket match in colonial Melbourne in November, 1858. I set the story in the mid 19th century for a number of reasons. I had spent almost three years researching and writing The Helots’ Tale series, which was set in the early to mid-1800s, so I was already embedded in the period, had a lot of research sources and, well, it felt like unfinished business.

The storyline came about after a Board meeting when I was considering the trust placed by us all in our lawyers. And I started to think, “What if?”.  I hasten to add that I do not subscribe to that line in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.  I have good friends of high integrity who are lawyers and besides, if we start there, how long before they come after the accountants? (which is my original qualification, although it’s been a long time since I juggled the debits and credits for a living).

I have written poetry and short stories but the Emigrant Niece is my first full-length work of fiction. Previous novels have been true stories rounded out with imagined conversations and likely or at least possible events.  There is something very fulfilling about bringing to life people whom you know only as entries in dusty ledgers but who you would really like to have known.  However, it is writing with handcuffs.  You can’t tell a true story unless you are talking with truth and when an opportunity arises to add an imagined plot to the story because it, perhaps, spices things up or creates tension or some other such literary artifice, it must be pushed away.  Veracity is all.  The lives of the people have to be interesting and exciting enough to carry the story on its own merits.

A work of fiction, however, has none of these restrictions and writing historical fiction, you get the best of both worlds – freedom to explore and the ability to integrate your story with real events and real people of the time.  Who wouldn’t want to experience the fabulous gold rush in Ballarat or ride a horse in the first running of the world-famous Melbourne Cup or even meet Ned Kelly (hopefully not on a remote road at night)?

This story quickly follows Findo Gask from combat in the Indian mutiny, to London where a mystery is solved, setting the stage for more to come, to Edinburgh before taking us on a rugged 3-month journey across the oceans to the New World and Back Creek, north of Melbourne, bang in the middle of the fabulous gold rush.

This was the century that moulded Australia, at this time still a collection of colonies that earlier in the century had seen more than 160,000 convicts transported to serve their sentences as all but slaves – a story related in the Helots’ Tale series.  The enormous wealth generated on the goldfields of Australia saw tent cities rapidly evolve into proud, prosperous Victorian towns and cities (as in Queen Victoria, not just the colony of Victoria).

On the new world frontier, Findo falls for an attractive young governess who, like him, hails from Scotland and he begins to suspect that she has been tricked out of a substantial inheritance by an unscrupulous family lawyer.  One thing leads to another and he returns to Scotland with his new friend, Errol Rait, to investigate and try to set things straight.  The lawyer, however, has other ideas and both men are soon drawn into a dark web of deceit and a murderous plot.

Using contemporary sources and other research the plot is intertwined with actual events and people of the time and gallops along as twists and turns, puzzles and danger keep our heroes on the trail. One early reviewer told me the “setting of the mining camp was so well done with such detail, I had to finish the chapter because I thought I had mud all over me after finishing the last sentence of the chapter”. That’s when you know you’ve got the historical detail just right!

I have just started the next book in the series, The Case of the Wandering Corpse.  I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me!

David CairnsAbout the Author

David Cairns, the Baron of Finavon (an ancient Scottish title), has always been a student of history.  Until recently, he was a technology entrepreneur with many successful (and – as he points out – one or two unsuccessful) ventures to his credit.

He has lived and worked on four continents and as a result has experienced the history of London and Boston, the buzz of Chicago, Nashville and Silicon Valley, the pioneering atmosphere of the South African bush, the lazy lifestyle of the Bahamas, the cultural diversities of Europe and the laid-back lifestyle of Australia, which is where he makes his home these days.

He is the author of The Helots’ Tale series – Downfall and Redemption.

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#BookReview Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver

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WakenhyrstAbout the Book

“Something has been let loose…”

In Edwardian Suffolk , a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father.

When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened.

Maud’s battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft , the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past.

Format: ebook (359 pages)          Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 4th April 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

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My Review

Wakenhyrst is described by the publishers as ‘a darkly Gothic thriller’ and there are definitely Gothic elements although I had to keep reminding myself the book is supposed to be set in 1911.  The style in which Edmund’s journals are written, his misogynistic views and even the domestic routine of Wake’s End seemed to me to evoke the 19th century rather than the years running up to the First World War. Similarly, the odious Dr Grayson’s outdated medical notions didn’t seem to belong in the 20th century.

The main part of the book consists of chapters from Maud’s point of view, interspersed with entries from her father’s journal and, later, excerpts from the writings of a medieval mystic, Alice Pyett (who is based on the English Christian mystic, Margery Kempe).

Edmund comes across as a monster, a man unable to control his sexual appetites and who is exacting to the point of obsession about how the household at Wake’s End should be run. His treatment of Maud’s mother amounts to what we would today recognise as coercive control, seeking to manage every aspect of her life: what she wears, what she eats, even how she identifies herself. He is also disdainful of his daughter Maud, a fact she only discovers much later.  Given her father’s belief there is no benefit in educating a woman, Maud is forced to make surreptitious visits to his library to satisfy her quest for knowledge. Despite everything, she matures into an intelligent and independent-minded young woman, readily embracing the theories of Charles Darwin and becoming increasingly disenchanted with religion.

The author creates an eerie and unsettling atmosphere using the vast, lonely fen that surrounds Wake’s End particularly well. It becomes one of the manifestations of Edmund’s increasing madness. ‘I kept catching whiffs of the fen itself: a swampy rottenness that seemed to come and go, making it doublt distracting.’  We witness Edmund’s increasingly paranoid imaginings, namely that a devil, like that depicted in the so-called Doom painting uncovered in the local church (think Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Last Judgment’), has been set loose. ‘I could feel the demon’s presence in the grounds: watching, waiting. It wants to stop me. It shall fail.’  He becomes convinced the fen is home to this demon leading him to research arcane rituals associated with exorcism, some of which are extremely gruesome.

Those familiar with the ghost stories of M.R. James will feel at home with scenes describing some of the events that so disturb Edmund, such as the grotesque carvings in the church (‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’) or his conviction that something is hidden in the ivy that cloaks the walls of Wake’s End (‘The Ash Tree’). ‘This morning when I sat down in my study with a book, I was disturbed by a furtive scrabbling at the windowpane. It wasn’t the tapping of a bird; this sounded more like claws. On raising the sash, I thought I glimpsed something scuttling off into the ivy.’ 

The reader witnesses Edmund’s deteriorating mental state which manifests itself in a kind of religious mania.  He increasingly sees parallels between his experiences and those of Alice Pyett and, later the life of St Guthlaf, to whom the local church is dedicated. He also has strange dreams and hallucinations. But are the displaced objects, the strange sounds or the obnoxious miasma evidence of the presence of supernatural beings or the work of human hands?

Having become her father’s secretary after her mother’s death – a death she holds her father reponsible for – Maud gains access to his journal, secretly reading his daily musings and, as a result, learning some shocking truths about his sister’s death and his increasingly deranged thoughts. She becomes fearful of what her father might be capable of and afraid for those around her, especially a young man employed in the household to whom she has become close.

Of course, the reader already knows what Edmund is capable of from the book’s prologue which describes the climactic event of the book, even if it does cast doubt on Maud’s role in it.  Only a few previously undisclosed details are saved for the end of the book, as Maud finally agrees to publication of the full story in order to counter the ‘lies’ contained in the newspaper article published in 1966 that opens the book, but also for the more practical reason that she needs to fund repairs to Wake’s End. For me, the framing device reduced the feeling of suspense that I hoped the book would deliver. I already knew what was going to happen and that it was the product of madness;  the next 300 pages were just about telling me why. However, I know  I’m in a minority here and many other readers have loved it.

I received a review copy via NetGalley.

In three words: Atmospheric, eerie, dark

Try something similar: The Bone Flower by Charles Lambert

Michelle PaverAbout the Author

Michelle Paver was born in central Africa but came to England as a child. After gaining a degree in Biochemistry at Oxford University, she was a partner at a City law firm, until she gave that up to write full time. She is the author of the bestselling, award-winning series that began with Wolf Brother. The series has sold over 3 million copies in 36 territories, with acclaimed audio editions read by Ian McKellen. Wolfbane is the final book in the series. Like the others it can be read as a standalone story. (Photo: Twitter profile)

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