But then I had to write the book. I had never written a historical novel set so far back in time and I wanted it to reflect as accurately as possible the manners and mores of the period. I researched how people spoke and thought and acted in late-Regency England, from the mansions of Mayfair to the slums of St Giles and Seven Dials, from the leafy village of Stoke Newington to a country estate in Gloucestershire.
I learned about black people in London and how they were regarded. I studied that curiously inconclusive war between the world's one superpower and a small, pushy little country half a world away: the War of 1812, the last time the British and the Americans fought on opposing sides, has never received the attention it deserves.
I examined contemporary maps and newspapers. I looked at clothes and furniture, carriages and houses – and ice houses. I read memoirs, diaries and letters. I found many useful ideas in the
The book has a first-person narrative, and perhaps foolishly I wanted the language to be as authentic as possible. For days on end, it seemed, I spent my working life trapped inside the
But all this was the easy part. The real problem was how to coax a murder mystery and a love story from scraps of history and the oblique hints in Poe's writings. It meant pain and grief and quite intense happiness, as the writing of novels usually does. I wrote an opening 20,000 words and then threw them away (always a liberating experience).
At last I found a voice. Most of the novel is the narrative of an impoverished schoolmaster with a chequered past that includes a brief but disastrous military career and history of mental instability. I stole his name, Thomas Shield, from my own great-great-great uncle. (The real Tom Shield grew up in Northumberland and eventually emigrated to New Zealand. He was a Victorian poet so obscure that even the British Library has not heard of him; the finest poem in his one published collection is his magisterial 'Ode to My Pipe'. He fathered at least fourteen children and was also quite possibly a bigamist.)
At the heart of the fictional Shield's story is Wavenhoe's Bank and the families concerned with its fortunes and misfortunes – and especially the women. The collapse of the bank is based on a real-life embezzlement case, which led to the Fauntleroy forgery trial of 1824 and eventually to the gallows. Poe haunts the writing of the book, though for much of the time he appears to play a relatively minor role.
Writing this novel was a long haul – eight years from idea to publication – but the American boy found his way into the world at last. Now, perhaps, I can safely forget him.
