Necessary as Blood—Behind the Book

There are writers who shudder when asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” but I think the question is both legitimate and fascinating. What could be more interesting than the creative process? I always want to know where other writers get their ideas—I know from experience that books don’t (or very rarely) fall full-fledged from the sky, although there are certainly days when a looming deadline makes me wish they did.

For me, stories form in layers, usually with more grit than pearl. Sometimes that first little grain is an idea, the imagination playing “What if?” with something heard or told or read; sometimes I fall in love with a setting and invent a story to suit it. Sometimes it’s a weird conglomeration of the two, and as the story develops it becomes chicken-or-egg. When the book is finished I can’t always pick the pieces apart.

Necessary as Blood was one of those. I’m not quite sure when I started thinking about setting a book in the East End. I knew London better further east and south—but little by little, the East End crept into my imagination, like tendrils of an old London pea-souper fog. Photos kept cropping up on one of my favorite blogs, London Daily Photo, with intriguing little bits of information. More East End blips began appearing on my radar, a reference here, a novel or a poem there.

Brick Lane, The Truman Brewery

Then, one day as I was checking London hotel reviews—I sometimes need a place to stay for a night or two when not in a flat—I came across The Hoxton. The Hox, as it is familiarly called, is in Shoreditch, a five minute walk from Brick Lane (the heart of the East End,) and is the ultimate in trendy urban chic. On the hotel web site they included not only a map, but the Hox Guide to Everything Quirky, a compendium of the funky, historical, and artsy places in the area. I was hooked.

While all this was percolating, I’d been thinking about a true crime story related to me by a friend, who had known the perpetrator through her work. I saw how a similar crime could be woven together with the threads of history and art and cultural conflict that make up the East End, and I began to see the how and why and who of the story.

It’s an edgy place, the East End. It’s always been an edgy place, a marginal place, the first refuge of immigrants, the last refuge of those down on their luck. But now that sanctuary, rough as it was, is being eaten away. The City of London marches relentlessly eastwards, leaving no haven for the displaced. Glass tower blocks loom over grimy tenements and twisting alleyways, and that clash between the haves and the have-nots, the old and the new, makes fertile ground for acts of greed and desperation.

And then there was Charlotte. I’ve said that stories seldom drop full blown into a writer’s mind, but sometimes characters do. I saw a child, a little girl not quite three. I knew her name. I knew that she was alone, grieving, unprotected from those who would use her for their own ends. I knew that she would change Duncan and Gemma’s lives in a profound way, and that the fate of this child was the core of the story.

Of course, I never know when I begin a story if the pieces will fit together the way I intended at the end. It seems to me that crime novels require two apparently conflicting things—a framework, and the freedom to let the story develop within the framework. But it’s those unexpected twists and turns that keep joy in the writing.

I stayed at the Hoxton for two nights on my next trip to London, although not by design. I had already booked a flat in Notting Hill, so I trekked back and forth from the West to the East, and although I clocked many hours and miles walking the East End (and discovered that the bus service is iffy late at night) I somehow never managed to get to the Hox. The day I was scheduled to fly home, however, I had a little gift from nature. I woke up to find London and the south of England blanketed by a thick, late snow. On the cab ride from the flat to Victoria, London was eerily, stunningly, white and silent; from the train to Gatwick Airport the countryside looked as if had been surprised by Christmas in April. But the south of England, like Texas, is not prepared for picture-postcard snow. All flights out of Gatwick were canceled. I cheered, rebooked my flight for two days hence, called the Hoxton to book a room, and went back to London. By that afternoon the snow had vanished, but I had one more full day to explore the East End, to find where my characters lived and worked and ate and drank and talked, and to figure out just where to stash the bodies (not as easy as you might think.)

When I returned to London the following August, I made the Hox my base. There I was fed, pampered, cosseted through a bout of flu. I discovered that the lobby is a lovely place to write while having afternoon tea, and that you can see any imaginable tattoo when the crowds are queueing at the nightclubs along the street.

I read, and walked, and obsessively recorded everything with my camera. I discovered the severely beautiful Georgian houses surrounding Brick Lane, built three centuries ago by the Huguenot silk weavers, the elite of their day. I walked Brick Lane when the clubs were letting out, the pavement sticky with spilled beer, broken glass crunching beneath my feet, and I browsed the stalls at the Sunday market, where you can buy almost anything, legal or not. I stood in the queue for a salt beef bagel at Beigel Bake at two a.m. on a Sunday, drinking stewed tea and rubbing shoulders with the drunk, the trendy, the homeless, and the Territorial Police in full gear. I learned to recognize a Banksy. I smelled curry in my sleep. In Hanover Street, I bumped into a crew filming Whitechapel, a TV mini-series about a modern-day Jack the Ripper. (Unfortunately, Rupert Penry-Jones, the star, wasn’t on the set that day.) I came to know Spitalfields Market, and Petticoat Lane, the Bangladeshi shops, the council estates, Columbia Road Flower Market, the art galleries, Christ Church Spitalfields, Hoxton Square—and as I did, the characters in my story begin to walk and talk along with me.

I had a wonderful education in the East End art scene courtesy of Kevin Caruth, owner of Urban Gentry, a walking tour company who do fabulous, personally guided tours of the London fashion and art world. (And thanks for the blisters, Kevin.)

I saw the Geffrye Museum.

I got to eat at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen.

I created Sandra Gilles’s textile art with advice from textile artist Darcy Falk and quilter Gigi Norwood.

I read so many wonderful books that brought the East End to life—Brick Lane by Monica Ali; 18 Folgate Street: A Tale of a House in Spitalfields, by Dennis Severs; Salaam Brick Lane, by Tarquin Hall; On Brick Lane, by Rachel Lichtenstein; The New East End, by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young. And of course there was Jack London, and Daniel Defoe, and Dickens … and all those other writers before or since who have attempted to capture an image, however fleeting, of the elusive and ever-changing East End.

I hope I have done my bit, as well.

I’m just back from almost three weeks in London, my second research trip for Where Memories Lie. I usually make at least two trips per book, sometimes three. The first trip is an idea gathering expedition, what I call “sponging”, as in soaking up ideas and atmosphere. This generates the basic building blocks of the story; plot, character, and most importantly, setting. The second and/or third trip is more detail-oriented, working out the exact locations where scenes occur and checking facts. On this trip, for instance, I had to make sure that Gavin Hoxley, my detective in 1952, would actually have seen the Albert Bridge when he goes to the scene of a murder. (It took me two days research on the Internet to make sure that the Albert Bridge would have been lit in May of 1952—and in fact, it was lit for the first time in May of 1951 for the Festival of Britain. And that little bit of research led to an idea for a future book set in a housing estate in North London that was purpose-built for the Festival, and has now been restored. That’s the way the odds and ends get into the idea soup that eventually turns into a book.) I had put the 1952 murder in the Royal Hospital Gardens, working from sketchy memory, and it turns out the garden I had in mind is actually Cheyne Gardens, a small heavily wooded garden just at the end of Cheyne Walk.

As much of the book is set in Notting Hill, I stayed, as I often do, in a flat in Pembridge Crescent, just one street off Portobello Road. It is what is called a garden flat, an English euphemism for the basement apartment. The flat does, in fact, have a wonderful garden in back, like a green well, and if the flat is rather shabbily chic, it has a gas fire in the sitting room, beautiful antiques and original art, and a conservatory built off the kitchen. I feel quite proprietary about the flat, as this is big part of what I do when researching a book—just living in London. I shop at the local supermarkets and delis, buy flowers, read newspapers, watch television, people-watch while I work at Starbucks, and of course, eavesdrop at the local pub. And as for any book set even partly in Notting Hill, there is Portobello Market. Every Saturday, rain or shine, masses of people flow down Portobello Road from Notting Hill Gate, past the antique arcades and junk stalls, the flower and vegetable and food vendors. The sounds of the different buskers fade in and out as you move down the hill, as do the smells of food cooking—sausages, paella, crepes—and it fascinates me just as much now as it did the very first time I went.

Good shoes and a camera are basic essentials of a research trip. I spend hours walking, taking pictures of possible locations for scenes, getting a feel for the streets and the atmosphere. For Where Memories Lie, a day’s walking in Notting Hill took me to Erika Rosenthal’s imagined house in Arundel Crescent; Duncan and Gemma’s house near the top of Lansdowne Road (imagining Gemma, walking down the hill to Erika’s house on a dark May night); Notting Hill Police Station; Melody Talbot’s imagined flat; the site of the former Jewish synagogue on Kensington Park Road, now a Montessori school; the site of the long vanished Mercury Café, where Erika goes for lunch and news during the war.

Other days I spent exploring World’s End on the far west edge of Chelsea, where young Kristin Cahill lives in a council flat with her parents; Cheyne Walk, where Kristin’s boyfriend Dominic lives with his mother in a grand house; Tedworth Square in the heart of Chelsea, where my detective lives in 1952 (that would still have been possible, then, on a policeman’s salary); St Barts hospital, near St. Paul’s in the City, where Gemma’s mum is being treated for leukemia; a rabbit-warren of streets in Fitzrovia, just north of Oxford St., the home of a down-and-out actor named Harry Pevensey; and Old Brompton Road in South Kensington, which in Where Memories Lie is the setting of the fictional auction house, Harrowby’s, where Erika Rosenthal’s long lost Art Deco necklace turns up for sale.

And always, as I walk the streets of Notting Hill, I imagine the bombs falling, and later the long, slow rebuilding of damaged lives and buildings, and Erika making a new life for herself, ever haunted by the shadows of the past.