As you will have guessed, I am fascinated by two subjects: the late Regency period, and financial crime. When I decided to write a story uniting the two, I found that I had chosen what booksellers tell me is a “non-genre” – in other words, a book that cannot find an obvious home on the shelves. But I’ve always been rather contrary, and when I hear about something that no-one else has written about, I want to take it on. And so it was with crime in the late Regency period.
In fiction there are more Victorian detectives than you can shake a stick at, and as for Regency romances, well, you can barely move for rakes and harlots. But Regency detectives – nary a one. Until Sam Plank, of course. And it’s mystifying, because the late Regency is such a fascinating period for policing, with the Bow Street Runners falling out of favour and London realising that it needs a more disciplined and unified police force.
So if you’re keen on crime fiction with a difference – it’s not filled with blood and gore, although there are deaths and London in the 1820s was a pretty filthy, stinky, unhealthy place – and you enjoy immersing yourself in another time and place, you might find that a Regency detective series is just right for you.
To read about the seven books in the Sam Plank Mysteries series, click here.
To read about the books in the growing Cambridge Hardiman Mysteries series, click here.
To find out where to buy them, click here.
To read about my non-fiction books, click here.
