KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!

~~~

VICAR BREKONRIDGE
A Vicar Brekonridge Novel Book 1
BY RICHARD HELMS

Blurb

“On a frigid January day on London’s Whitehall in 1843, a Scottish woodturner named Daniel M’Naghten guns down Edward Drummond, believing him to be British Prime Minister Robert Peel. M’Naghten, who sympathizes with the Chartist cause in Great Britain, claims he intended to murder the Prime Minister—a Tory—because he blames Peel for persecution by the Tories in his home city of Glasgow. Queen Victoria, incensed at the most recent attempt on a high government official’s life, demands that M’Naghten be hanged. M’Naghten, however, demonstrates every accepted sign of insanity, which would save him a visit to Tyburn Tree. Queen’s Counsel Alexander Cockburn is hired to defend M’Naghten, and he recruits legendary thief-taker Vicar Brekonridge to travel to Glasgow to investigate M’Naghten’s claims, with the goal of supporting an insanity plea. He sends young law clerk Simon Daughtrey to Glasgow with Brekonridge, and together they uncover contradictory evidence suggesting that M’Naghten’s motivations in the murder of Edward Drummond might be considerably more sinister than mental illness. With M’Naghten’s trial days away, Brekonridge and Daughtrey race to find the truth behind the assassination of Edward Drummond.”

Frequently, I don’t remember when or how an idea for a novel occurred to me. That’s not the case with my latest historical mystery Vicar Brekonridge ( https://www.amazon.com/Vicar-Brekonridge-Novel/dp/168512352X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1700603329&sr=1-1 ). I know exactly when I came up with it.

I was in a sushi bar in Matthews, North Carolina, sometime around autumn of 2015. I was enjoying some miso soup, spider rolls, and California rolls, and reading Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time. I’ve always been a history buff, and it is highly likely that one of my ancestors, Welsh chieftain Rhys Ap Thomas, actually slew King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Therefore, Tey’s dramatization of Richard’s downfall and the mystery surrounding his burial was of keen interest to me.

I had already published one historical mystery, 2013’s Shamus Award-nominated The Mojito Coast, which took place during the Cuban Revolution in 1958. I had enjoyed writing about other times, and thought it might be fun to come up with another mystery built around a real historical event. But which one?

I was a college psychology professor at the time and, as it happens, I had lectured just that morning about the 1843 London trail of Daniel M’Naghten, and how the decision in that case rewrote almost four hundred years of English common law regarding insanity. I immediately seized on that case as the spine of my projected novel. My original intent was to write about the political upheaval of the period (Chartists, the Plug Plot Riots, etc), and tell the story from both the side of the Crown and the protestors, and how that might have led to the assassination attempt by M’Naghten on Robert Peel that instead felled his private secretary Edward Drummond. I was familiar with Dr. Richard Moran’s exhaustive examination of the case (Knowing Right From Wrong) and his contention that M’Naghten was not insane at all, but rather was hired by persons unknown to kill the Prime Minister. I retired from teaching the following summer, while still accumulating research for the book, and set about writing it in the fall of 2016. The result early in 2017 was a massive 750 page doorstop of a first draft that read as kind of a soap opera combined with a courtroom drama, and didn’t satisfy me. Worried that I might have wasted a year and a half on a dud, I sat down and considered all my options.

As it happens, I had just recently completed a short story for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine featuring a hulking 1840s London thief-taker named Vicar Brekonridge (“The Cripplegate Apprehension”). That story went on to earn a Derringer Award nomination, so I knew the character had legs. The M’Naghten novel to that point had a strong third-person edge, but was a little dry. Inserting Brekonridge into it as a fictional investigator for real-life M’Naghten defense barrister Alexander Cockburn felt like a slam-dunk solution. It provided a stand-in for the reader as a surrogate observer of the events surrounding the trial, and a character whose internal debate could illuminate the facts of the story. As Brekonridge says several times during the tale, “I have questions, and I will have answers for them.” My hope was that Brekonridge would echo the questions raised in the readers’ minds, and draw them in as partners in his investigation. I think it worked.

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of dining with legendary science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. During our conversation, he talked about the symbol he used as part of his signature, a strange modified ‘Q’ bisected by an upward-flying arrow. He said the symbol stood for “Ask the next question.” Readers of Vicar Brekonridge will recognize this command readily, as he uses it frequently to prod his young investigative companion Simon Daughtrey to explore a tricky question more closely. Daughtrey was also a later addition. I realized that Brekonridge needed a sounding board off which to bounce his own questions, and Simon proved to be a perfect student, and not a half-bad investigator in his own right. Simon Daughtrey plays Watson to Brekonridge’s Sherlock Holmes, and in the process allows Brekonridge to voice his own internal dialogue in a more organic and natural way. Adding just these two characters brought the book to life.

My original intent while chomping on sushi eight years ago was to write a straightforward historical novel. That didn’t work out, but I’ve discovered many times that nothing pays off like persistence. I think using the famous M’Naghten trial as a framework for a ripping mystery– still unsolved to this day–made for a much more engrossing and fulfilling read. As a side benefit, the extensive research (hundreds of pages) that I collected for Vicar Brekonridge enabled me to write a non-fiction book of my own about the M’Naghten trial and its aftermath, which I hope to publish in a year or so.

In the process, I realized I had also written a scathing indictment of the British government on the cusp of The Gilded Age, and its insistence on maintaining a heavily stratified population in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The machinations, rationalizations, and collusion surrounding the M’Naghten trial of 1843 is presented front and center, and provides the primary conflict for my stalwart, honest, and principled investigator Vicar Brekonridge and his young companion Simon Daughtrey. I hope the readers will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And keep an eye out for more of Vicar Brekonridge. He appeared in a recent story in Mystery Magazine (“Corpse Cake”). I’m working on another short story involving the British opium trade in the 1840s, and a third involving the murder of a cordswainer. In addition, I’ve been working on a sequel novel in which Brekonridge travels to America, and a third that takes him and Simon Daughtrey to Australia in pursuit of a transported criminal needed for an important trial in London.

Read all you want! I’ll write more!

About Author Richard Helms…

~~~

Links to Richard’s websites, blogs, books, #ad etc.:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Vicar-Brekonridge-Novel/dp/168512352X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1700603329&sr=1-1

~~~

Thanks, Richard, for sharing your book with us!

Don’t miss the chance to read this book!