I was inspired by the voices of Catherine Sorgeuil and the Man of Crows, a murderer who holds London to ransom, while spending a rather solitary summer in Paris. It was hot and the streets around my apartment were quiet at night, after the tourists had gone back to their hotels. As I was wandering around late at night past deserted looking houses, I began to imagine myself back in the early nineteenth century – it didn’t seem such a jump.
And then, as I walked, I found myself elsewhere; it was as if I was in 1840s London, not Paris at all. I had researched the period intensively as part of my work as a historian, but it had never arrived in my imagination.
Previously, the history had been a host of sources and voices – but what came to me while I was walking was a whole imagined world. And it came with the personalities of Catherine and the Man of Crows…They took me over and I found myself writing the book in cafes, so hard that my hand hurt.
I used black books with close lines so the words were crammed together on the page – like people in Spitalfields and London in general. For the days were not long gone when London was so spacious and near to the country that one could still see deer – but the city had become a seething, often terrifying metropolis. It harboured secrets – and crime.
My character, Catherine Sorgeuil, becomes obsessed with the crime. The Man of Crows is killing women in a brutal fashion. Catherine, haunted by her unhappy past, becomes preoccupied by him – and sure she can find him. She tries to write about him and his victims, and, as she does so, takes …
