Lent 1615. Susanna Shakespeare Hall hares down Chapel Street in Stratford-upon-Avon,
skirts flying about her knees, her boots splattering mud on her gown while the townspeople
roar with laughter at her. She clutches at her dog, Chaos, bundled up in crumpled linen. A
huge satchel swings heavily at her back. Silently she spurs herself on. Run from this
godforsaken town! Run from your cheating husband! Run from your lying mother! Run to the
life you want to lead!
What could have possessed Will Shakespeare’s ‘sensible’ daughter to make such a
spectacle worthy of Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew? Well. . . it was Will himself who
tossed the proverbial pebble into the troubled Stratford waters. He had collapsed on stage –
not for the first time. (These ‘fainting spells’ are deemed to be a sign of possession by the
devil, so it is ssssshhhhh. . . all very hush hush.) Will, thinking he may be dying, prepares for
his legacy. He sends his trusted friend and fellow player in The King’s Men, the handsome
widower John Heminges, to go to Stratford, retrieve his original manuscripts from his wife
Anne and fetch more of his ‘life-saving tonic’ prepared by Susanna’s doctor husband, John
Hall. Of course, Will knew that Anne’s reaction would be ‘over my rotting corpse’. And
therein hangs the rest of the tale. . . replete with rapscallions, actors (not people according to
Anne) and highwaymen.
Completion due July 2026, currently represented by Julian@BlakeFriedmann.co.uk
The Locked Room:
Based on my genealogy research about my paternal grandmother growing up in Whitechapel.
The 27-year-old energetic Dr Arthur Conan Doyle was at a crossroads in June 1886. His historical fiction had been singularly unsuccessful — almost as unsuccessful as his medical practice in Southsea, Hampshire. Doyle had written and sold his first story about his consulting detective Sherlock Holmes — A Study in Scarlet — but publication was delayed until Christmas 1886. While appearing at the coroner’s court on behalf of a life insurance company in Whitechapel that June, the last thing he expected was to become involved in a gruesome locked room murder mystery. Inspired by the puzzle behind the murder, and a miscarriage of justice by a manic depressive judge, Conan Doyle attempts to imitate his creation Holmes to solve the crime. It is the story of how Doyle the writer finds himself and learns to use his research and medical knowledge to solve a real-life crime.
The King’s Ring
Set in the Cotswolds in 1937 and based on my non-fiction research for the book, Hitler’s Aristocrats published March 2023.
When the beautiful and mysterious Magda Sørensen checks into the Cotswold Priory Manor Hotel and is killed the next day after a dinner party at nearby Beaumont Hall, the duke and government minister, Henry Beaumont, steps in hoping to influence or halt the investigation.
DCI Alec Webb of Scotland Yard is appointed to investigate and must confront his deeply troubled past with the aristocratic Beaumonts to unravel the many twists in the tale of Sørensen’s murder that links the aristocracy, University of Oxford, and international politics of the day.