A lovely interview on The Irish Inheritance.

Here's a lovely interview I did recently on bookish jottings.

The Irish Inheritance by MJ Lee blog tour Q&A

POSTED ON AUGUST 21, 2016 BY JULIE B.

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I am delighted to welcome author MJ Lee to Bookish Jottings today for a chat about historical crime fiction, research and what’s coming up next!

 

Thank you so much for joining me here at Bookish Jottings, Martin! It’s great to have you here. Could you please start by telling me something about yourself and the books you write?

Thank you for having me. I’ve spent my life writing for a living, but in the commercial arena. I was the creative director of a number of large advertising agencies, ending up as the Chief Creative Officer of a multinational in China. That last posting was a blast, I can tell you. It led to my first series of books for HarperCollins/HQ set in Shanghai in the 1920s. I also write a series of novels for Endeavour Press with Samuel Pepys as an investigator working for Charles II which came out of my research at University. My latest book, The Irish Inheritance, features another of my passions, genealogy. I’m fascinated by the history of families. They all have secrets no matter how conservative they appear from the outside.

What drew you to writing crime fiction?

I write historical crime fiction. All my books have a historical element to them. I think it’s because I’ve always loved history. I remember as a five year old child sitting up in bed and looking at the pictures in a book my mother had given me. The book was the Kings and Queens of England. I guess it set me on my path to writing later in life. Why there is always a crime element I’m not so sure. Perhaps, it is because there’s a moral side to crime stories. There is right and wrong, with all the shades of truth that lie between, in every crime story. It’s this moral element that attracts me. What pushes people to commit a crime?

What kind of research do you do for your books?

I love research and having undertaken a research degree in history, I’m very comfortable working with original documents. For example, my latest novel, The Irish Inheritance, is set partly in the Easter Rising of 1916. We’re very lucky as there is an extensive archive of interviews with the participants in the Rising at the Irish Archives, the Bureau of Military History, on RTE, the state television station, the Pension service, as well as many memoirs for the period from the likes of Eamonn O’Malley. The Bureau of Military History in Dublin contains over 1200 interviews from people involved in the Easter Rising, transcribed in the 1950s. These are a wonderful trove of original material which I used extensively to ensure the events I described actually took place. Historical accuracy is incredibly important to me, but I’m writing a novel not a work of non-fiction. The imagination comes into play when I see the events through the eyes of my characters, with all their eccentricities and flaws.

How long does it take you to write a book?

It’s funny you should ask that, because it was something I finally worked out for myself just this year. All in all, it takes me approximately 500 hours from beginning work to finished book, over a period of about six months. But some take longer than others.

How would you describe your latest book, The Irish Inheritance, in a single sentence?

It’s a genealogical mystery where digging up the past reveals more than secrets

What is The Irish Inheritance about?

The Irish Inheritance is the first in a series of Jayne Sinclair genealogical mysteries.

When an adopted American businessman dying with cancer asks her to discover his real family, it opens up a world of intrigue and forgotten secrets for Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator. She only has two clues: a book and an old photograph. Can she find out the truth before he dies?

What do you think accounts for the perennial popularity of crime fiction?

I think it’s popular for two reasons. The first I touched on earlier; crime fiction is essentially moral. It deals with moral dilemmas that people face in extreme circumstances. The second is that it taps in to an inbuilt need for people to hear and read stories. Most crime is a Quest story – somebody is searching for the truth of an event. It could be a murder, a theft, or even a missing parent. The Quest has been an enduring archetype for all of human history from the desire to find the promised land, through to the search for the Holy Grail, up to the present day movies like Star Wars. They are all Quest stories. For some reason, we are hard-wired to seek the truth.

What is your all time favourite crime novel?

A hard question. For historical crime, it has to be Josephine Tey’s ‘The Daughter of Time’. For modern writers, any series by Peter James or Ian Rankin keeps me happy. I have read Agatha Christie’s ‘And then there were none’ more times than I care to remember. It’s the perfectly plotted novel.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Do three things. Read. Read. Read. And when you get bored, read again. But read with a critical eye. How was that plot point introduced? How did character A go to B? How was the motivation for the character introduced?Did you believe it? Do you believe these characters?

What’s coming up next for you?

I’ve finished the second draft of the second Jayne Sinclair genealogical mystery, it should be out later this year. Just a couple of more edits to go. I tend to write four, it’s a process that works for me. I’m also writing the final sections of the third Inspector Danilov book as we speak. It’s coming out early next year. Then, I’ve planned and plotted the second Samuel Pepys story set in the Versailles of Louis XIV. I’ll start writing in October and it will also come out next year, I hope.It’s a busy time, but I love revisiting these worlds. For me, they are just as real as the world I live in, perhaps more so.

 

 

 

An interview with Asianbooksblog

Last week, I was interviewed by Siobhan Daiko for the Asianbooksblog. Here's the text from the wonderful people at that site.

500 words from MJ Lee

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, or published by Asia-based, or Asia-focused, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Here MJ Lee, a Briton who has lived in London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok and Shanghai, and who now splits his time between the UK and Asia, talks about his Inspector Danilov series.  These crime novels, set in the Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s, feature as the sleuths Inspector Pyotr Danilov, a Russian, and his half-Scottish half-Chinese sidekick, Detective Sergeant Strachan. Martin chose to set his novels in Shanghai, between the two world wars, because it was in his opinion, the perfect location for any murder - a city of shadows, where death, decadence and debauchery stalked the art deco streets.

 So: over to Martin…

I remember very clearly when the idea for writing a novel set in the Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s came to me.  I was out strolling the city one evening. It was around dusk in October, one of the best times of the year in Shanghai. Perfect walking weather. I reached the crossroads at Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road, just opposite the Metropole Hotel. For a moment, there was no traffic and no people, a strange occurrence in the city. I was suddenly transported back to the 1920s, imagining old Dodges, Packards and Chevrolets rolling up to the hotel, discharging carloads of flappers and elegant men wearing tuxedos. A lovely moment, trapped in time.

The period between the wars was an amazing time in Shanghai. The city of ‘joy, gin and jazz’ was an amazing melting pot of adventurers, spies, triad members, opium smugglers, merchants, con-men, communists, criminals, fascists, Japanese militarists, gamblers and refugees. With such a witches’ cauldron of deceit and double-dealing, happiness and despair, wealth and poverty, it soon became obvious that only a crime novel, with its strong moral compass, could explore the depths of the abyss that was Shanghai. And so the books were born.

The two main characters, Detective Inspector Danilov and Detective Sergeant Strachan, are both outsiders, in a society full of outsiders. They are employed by the Shanghai Municipal Police but distanced from the rest of their colleagues, and from the society of the time. Mavericks are always so much more interesting to read about and to write. The choice of Danilov as the lead in the books actually came from a line in a policeman’s memoir of the time. He mentioned that when they had a problem, both the French and Shanghai police turned to White Russian members of their forces to solve it for them.

Two books in the series have been published so far, Death in Shanghai and City of Shadows, with a third on the way in October this year. Given the wonderful cesspit of characters who lived in Shanghai, the original ‘Pearl of the Orient’ there’s no shortage of wonderful material for the future.


Details: The Danilov series is published by Carina, an imprint of Harper Collins, in eBook, priced in local currencies.

 

 

A lovely interview with Eva Jordan

It is my great pleasure to introduce Martin Lee as my guest author today. Martin is the author of the Inspector Danilov novels and the recently published City Of Shadows is the second book in the series. Martin is also the author of the recently released Samuel Pepys and the Stolen Diary.  Martin has spent most of his adult life writing in one form or another and here he talks about how his love of history and travel merged one evening during a stroll in Shanghi, sparking the idea for the Inspector Danilov novels.

City Of Shadows is described as,

A family has been found murdered in the heart of 1920s Shanghai. But what could have compelled them to open the door to their killer?

Thanks Eva for this opportunity to talk about myself and the Danilov novels. It’s something I love doing almost as much as I love writing the books.

You see, I had two passions growing up. I fell in love with history when I was very young. I have a vague memory of sitting up in bed one summer’s evening, I must have been five or six years old, reading a book my mother had given me with pictures of the Kings and Queens of England in it. We weren’t a big book reading family and besides, we were Irish, so why we would have this particular book? I haven’t the foggiest. But I do know with absolute clarity that was the moment I fell in love with history.

The other passion was crime novels. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dashiel Hammett, Mickey Spillane and Ed McBain all graced my sticky little fingers. I still have many of the copies of the books with their wonderfully lurid covers at home.

Well, a few years has passed since then. I did a degree and postgraduate degree in history, but never became a criminal, having no opportunity to put into practise the methods of murder so beautifully described by Ms Christie. I spent most of my working life in advertising (it was the only place that would pay me to have ideas), taking a couple of sabbaticals to write. I still have the rotten evidence of those sabbatical years on my computer – three books that have no hope of ever getting published.

A couple of years ago I became a freelance Creative Director, writing novels in the mornings and doing my freelance work in the afternoons. Finally, I had achieved the sort of balance I wanted in my life ( a book in each hand).

I remember very clearly when the idea for writing a novel set in the Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s came to me.

I was out strolling one evening in Shanghai (we were living in the city at that time). It was around dusk in October, one of the best times of the year in the city. Perfect walking weather. I reached the crossroads at Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road, just opposite the Metropole Hotel. A square where four Art Deco buildings built in the 1930s meet. For a moment, there was no traffic and no people, a strange occurrence in a city of over twenty million people. I closed my eyes and was suddenly transported back to the 1920s, imagining old Dodges, Packards and Chevrolets rolling up to the hotel, discharging carloads of flappers and elegant men wearing tuxedos. A lovely moment, trapped in time.

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The Inspector Danilov books were born. And what a time to write about. Back then; the city of ‘joy, gin and jazz’ was an amazing melting pot of adventurers, spies, triads, opium smugglers, merchants, con-men, communists, criminals, fascists, Japanese miltarists, gamblers and refugees. With such a witches cauldron of deceit and double-dealing, happiness and despair, wealth and poverty, it soon became obvious that only a crime novel, with its strong moral compass, could explore the depths of the abyss that was Shanghai.

The two main characters, Detective Inspector Danilov and Detective Sergeant Strachan, are both outsiders, in a society full of outsiders. They are employed by the Shanghai Municipal Police but distanced and separate from the rest of their colleagues, and from the society of the time. Mavericks are always so much more interesting to read about and to write. The choice of Danilov as the lead in the books actually came from a line in a policeman’s memoir of the time. He mentioned that when they had a problem, both the French and Shanghai police turned to White Russian members of their forces to solve it for them.

At last, my two passions, history and crime, can now both co-exist together. So far, two books in the series have been published, Death in Shanghai and City of Shadows, with a third on the way in October. Given the wonderful cesspit of characters who lived in the original ‘Pearl of the Orient’ there’s no shortage of wonderful material for the future.

The Danilov series of historical crime thrillers is published by Carina, an imprint of Harper Collins. They are available at Amazon and other online bookstores.

You can find Martin and his books here on his Amazon Author Page

You can also find him on:

Twitter: @writermjlee

Facebook: writermjlee

Website: http://www.writermjlee.com

 

Samuel Pepys: A modern man.

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Here's an article I wrote recently for the English History Fiction Writers website. Enjoy.

 

Samuel Pepys: A man of our times. 

 

On the 31st May, 1669, Samuels Pepys wrote in his diary, ‘And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!’  It was to be the last entry. For the previous nine and a half years, he had been keeping the diary religiously, writing an account of his life and the world that surrounded him. 

He was fortunate (or unfortunate) to live in an amazing time, witness to the great events that shaped Stuart Britain.  He lived through a period of turmoil; the death of one king, the reign of a dictator, Oliver Cromwell,  the restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II, the deposition of his brother, James II and the crowning of William of Orange, an outsider and king of a country which in 1667 had devastated the Navy he loved. 

Two natural disasters, The Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of London in 1666, occurred in his lifetime and he described both in vivid detail. He lived in a period of great social change, when the puritan morality of the Commonwealth gave way to the more licentious and spirited society ofthe Restoration. He goes into delicious, and disturbingly honest, detail about his home life, his affairs, his ever-increasing wealth, some of it obtained dubiously,  and the passions of the court.

He witnessed it all and wrote about it in wonderfully evocative language. Here he is in November 1660,  describing a meeting with a friend who reminded him of his attendance at the beheading of Charles I when Pepys was just a 15 year-old boy.

‘He did remember that I was a great roundhead when I was a boy, and I was much afeared that he would have remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded that, were I to preach upon him, my text should be “The memory of the wicked shall rot”. ( November 1, 1660)

He remained in London through the plague year of 1665, writing, ‘I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there – which was a sad sight to me’.  (June 7, 1665

Later, he seems more depressed as the plague has taken hold of London. Here is his entry for October 16 1665:

‘I walked to the Tower. But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so manyin that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician, and but one apothecary left, all being dead — but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week: God send it.’

The following year, during the Great Fire of London, he was at the centre of the efforts to save the city from the flames, reporting on the events like Dan Rather;

 ‘Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off. So to my closett to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.’ (September 2nd, 1666)

And later, he’s examining the fire from a better vantage point.  ‘I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afeard to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W. Pen’s, and there eat a piece of cold meat, having eaten nothing since Sunday, but the remains of Sunday’s dinner.’ (September 4th 1666)

He’s very good on the details. Pepys records burying his parmesan cheese and his wine in a pit in the garden, scorched pigeons falling from the skies, a burnt cat pulled alive from a chimney, the price of a loaf (two pence), glass melted and buckled by the heat and people burning their feet on the scorched ground. 

Like the great reporter and observer Pepys is, he puts us in the middle of the action, hearing, smelling, seeing, feeling and touching the events for ourselves.

It is that ability to combine the personal with the political which makes Pepys unique. He  can go from describing what he had to eat for breakfast to the latest machinations amongst the mistresses of the King in a couple of sentences. All with a trade mark wit and power of observation.

‘I now took them to Westminster Abbey and there did show them all the tombs very finely, having one with us alone (there being other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday); and here we did see, by perticular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.’ (Feb 29th 1669).

There is so much to love and admire in the Pepys Diaries. If you are in the UK, there is a wonderful exhibition on until March at Greenwich featuring the man and his times.

Finally, here is his entry for this day 350 years ago on February 23rd 1666, when he seems happy with the world.

‘So I supped, and was merry at home all the evening, and the rather it being my birthday, 33 years, for which God be praised that I am in so good a condition of healthe and estate, and every thing else as I am, beyond expectation, in all. So she to Mrs. Turner’s to lie, and we to bed. Mightily pleased to find myself in condition to have these people come about me and to be able to entertain them, and have the pleasure of their qualities, than which no man can have more in the world.’

A wonderful epitaph for the man and his life.

Death in Shanghai on Historic Shanghai

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Here is the text of an interview I did recently with Historic Shanghai, a great website for all things to do with the city and it's wonderful past. Enjoy.

 

MJ Lee’s Death in Shanghai is a delicious crime novel set in old Shanghai. Terrific plot, great characters, superb writing – and oh, the historical detail! It truly brings old Shanghai to life, infusing the characters, and even the crime. We wanted to know more, and author Martin Lee obliged us with an interview.

Historic Shanghai: How, and why, did you select Shanghai in 1928 as your setting for a crime novel? Which came first – the setting or the story?

MJ Lee: I remember very clearly when the idea for writing a novel came to me. I was living and working in Shanghai at the time, and was out walking one evening. It was around dusk in October, one of the best times of the year in Shanghai. Perfect walking weather. I reached the crossroads at Jiangxi Zhong Lu and Fuzhou Lu, just opposite the Metropole Hotel, where those three Art Deco skyscrapers look down on you. For a moment, there was no traffic and no people, a strange occurrence in Shanghai. I was suddenly transported back to the 1930s, imagining old Dodges and Chevrolets rolling up to the hotel, discharging carloads of flappers and elegant men wearing tuxedos. A lovely moment. It was then that I decided to start writing. So I guess it was the setting that inspired me. The idea of a crime novel came after I had done some research, realizing that the period was the perfect location for such a story.

The Metropole Hotel and Hamilton House: the spot that inspired MJ Lee to write Death in Shanghai.

 

HS: You describe late 1920s Shanghai beautifully – not just the descriptions [which are lovely] but also the historical detail, which is so accurate! How, and where, did you do your research? [Lots of details, please – Historic Shanghai geeks love information like this!]

MJL: Thank you for the compliment, I love doing research. Death in Shanghai is a novel but it was important to me to get the details correct. Luckily, there are some wonderful sources. I started with Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai, the magisterial book on the Shanghai Municipal Police by Robert Bickers. That led me to autobiographies written by serving policeman, E. W. Peters and Ted Quigley, and a biography of W E Fairbairn. Once I understood the background, the Shanghai Public Security Museum, the Shanghai Municipal Council archives, the police archives, even the police handbook for 1938 written by Bill Widdowson, were indispensable.

For a flavour of the period and Shanghai style, Stella Dong, Lynn Pan, Andrew David Field, Christian Henriot, Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Bernard Wasserstein helped enormously.

To bring the past to life, I used the Reverend C. E. Darwent’s guide for 1911, Gow’s Guide to Shanghai 1924, and Paul French’s The Old Shanghai A-Z, which is simply the best street guide to colonial Shanghai. His book on Carl Crow  also gives a wonderful feel for the period. Tales of Old Shanghai by Earnshaw Books also gave a gossipy (in the nicest way) introduction to the people and stories of the period.

On the web, Robert Bickers has created a wonderful visual resource in Historical Photographs of China as has Virtual Shanghai. There are few very useful blogs, all of which I’m happy to say I found here on Historic Shanghai. Finally, Youtube has a great Russian silent documentary, The Shanghai Document, shot in 1928. I used one of the images in this to help Inspector Danilov solve the crime!

These are just a few of the sources. There are still others I am tracking down. But most of all, I just loved walking around the streets of the city. At first, I used the excellent walking guides published by Old China Hand Press, but after a while I just used to wander wherever I felt like going. The Chinese people I met were very tolerant of this strange foreigner intruding in their space. Shanghai is such a great city to wander around.

Despite all the research, I still made mistakes, placing Danilov’s dwelling in Medhurst Apartments. Your readers will be aware that this building wasn’t constructed until 1934. I’m happy to hear if readers spot other mistakes as I will change them in the next edition. But Death in Shanghai is a work of imagination, not a history. Sometimes, one has to bend the past to suit the exigencies of story and plot.

SH-policeman.jpg

Lee’s research including reading police biographies from the period.

 

HS: You’ve said that you learned a great deal from talking with older Shanghai residents – tell us more!

MJL: The main oral source was my father-in-law, Mr Kao Chin Pong, and his opera buddies. He grew up in Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, living around Jing’an Temple. He has an unpublished memoir which my wife translated for me. Most of it concerns daily life at the time and his school days. He seems to have spent a lot of his youth in opera houses, tea houses, cinemas and theatres! Perhaps that was why he became an actor in later life. I would love to meet people who grew up in the period. They will be in their eighties at they moment, though.

HS: Your main character, Danilov, is a White Russian and his sidekick, Strachan, is half-Shanghainese, half-Scottish. Both were prevalent in old Shanghai, but they don’t appear very much in the literature of old Shanghai. Why do you think that is? And why did you select these particular ethnicities/nationalities to tell your story?

MJL: Actually, there are very few novels written about the period, only three or four I think, which was one of the attractions for me. I’ve deliberately avoided reading them, preferring to create my own version of the Shanghai of the period based on my research.

Both Danilov and Strachan are outsiders, in a society full of outsiders. It gave me the ability to distance them from the rest of the police force, and from the society of the time. Mavericks are always so much more interesting to read about and to write. The choice of Danilov as the lead in the books actually came from a line in E. W. Peters’ memoir. He mentioned that when they had a problem, both the French and Shanghai police turned to White Russian members of their forces to solve it for them.

The Russian Auxiliary Police in the French Concession police force – the real-life inspiration for Inspector Danilov.

 

HS: Tell us about the next book.

The next book is called City of Shadows and will be published on March 11th. It details the murder of a family of four in one of the lanes off Hankow Road. Danilov and Strachan are called in to investigate, forcing them to confront a terrible murder and their own image of a what a loving family means