Why I wrote The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles

Hello Dear Reader and welcome to second in my “Why I wrote…” series of blogs.

When I started thinking about what I wanted The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles to be about I was watching, whilst curled up on the sofa with my wife and a bottle of wine, a lot of obscure British films made in the 1970s. We went through Hammer and Amacus horror films, British New Wave, and a number of weird pieces by a director called Pete Walker -- crazily deranged films like House of Whipchord, House of Mortal Sin and Frightmare. We even became fans of Sheila Keith, an actress from the time who played a lesbian prison warder with such unalloyed evil delight that she was a joy to watch.

Another influence came from a the Victorian books I was reading at the time, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and other gothic literature. Rowena Ramsbottom’s rambling journal owes a little nod to Jane Austin.

One very strong influence was what I call “The Spooky Past”. The social aspects of the world gone by and the people who lived before us is always something that has fascinated me. When looking at old photographs, you glimpse a world long gone, a vision of the dead, earnest, or smiling, living their lives. It’s the closest most of use will ever get to seeing a ghost (note how I say most of us!). Those long dead are with us, in our imagination, with all the cultural baggage that entails.

The final influence was one of the ancestry of ancient belief systems. Christianity has many tropes, like Christmas Trees, Yule logs and Santa, that stretch way back to long forgotten pagan beliefs. Even the legends of vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies can trace their roots to a common pagan source.

And so these various strands swirled around and mixed in my mind. After a huge about of writing, fine tuning, rewriting, and generally fiddling about, an entire world revealed itself. Middenmere is a city every bit as complex as a real one, and it’s people (from now and its distant past) haunt it in every way imaginable.

I am very proud of the end result. A tale of Gothic Victoriana, of 1970’s grooviness, of pagan legends, student romance, teenage angst, and mystery galore!