fuonlyknew

London 1881. Can two
crooked women stop a murder?

Extravagant medium Mrs Ashton and her lover,
blunt working-class Mrs Bradshaw, run a spiritualist scam. Mrs Ashton secretly
reads minds.

Believing that Mrs Ashton is genuine,
grieving Lady Violet craves the truth behind her mother’s untimely death. But
Lady Violet’s powerful husband Sir Charles hates spiritualists. Has he killed
before?

Uncovering this MP’s wicked crimes will put
all three women in terrible danger…

To solve a shocking
murder, look on both sides of the grave.

“An astonishing feat of twisting plots and perceptions”

“It’s deliciously twisty, with women who won’t be told, a young bride
in peril, and the delicate art of a con.”

“A book I’ve been looking for all my life. Queer found family all
wrapped up in a supernatural murder mystery. Absolute perfection.”

“a brilliant, gripping story. .. if you’re looking for a great new book
to read, I encourage you to check it out.”

“…an actually intriguing mystery.”

“with a new murder thrown in and a couple of pre-existing ones
uncovered, we get an astonishing story of redemption with well-plotted but
never signposted twists and turns thrown in at every stage.”

“…a murder mystery with a supernatural spin. … the premise and plot
were great. The story is very atmospheric with a very nasty aristocrat villain.
..an entertaining read…”

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Chapter 4. The Ambitions of Miss Maisie Kendrick

Second floor back, 13 Jonah Court, Wretchmarket, Thameswake. Friday

Authors note. We meet Maisie in Chapter 1 but this is the first chapter from her viewpoint. 

The family’s grimy rooms in Jonah Court were one room split by ragged curtains. Rats worked their scurrying mischief under the floors. Maisie had heard Pa go before first light, red-eyed and guilty, to look for work. He’d eaten the last food, for a docker cannot work empty to find the rent. Everything would be far worse on the street.

Maisie had work for Mrs Ashton today, a real adventure. A wicked sir puffed up with his money and importance, and a weeping childless lady in danger. Mrs Ashton might need her for weeks. The sexton had told her something odd last night, about people snooping on the two strange birds. Maisie must get the kids to school then investigate.

She got George and Tildy waked, wiped, and decent, and gave George the medicine she hid under her women’s rags, so Pa wouldn’t drink it. Thank goodness for Mrs Colquhoun downstairs – she was a mighty gap-toothed ogre, but she’d loved Ma and had a soft heart, which meant porridge for the three of them and bread to take for lunch. Payment was the stern lecture Maisie knew by heart, on the heathen failings of Mrs Ashton – the warning of the Holy Father against ghost-mongering – and the desirability of good, honest, reliable work.

Mrs Colquhoun had the whole downstairs floor of the building for her needle-girls, and Maisie sewed for her when nothing else paid. Such long dull work, and if her mind fled to far-off lands or solving mysteries, she made mistakes and the work had to be done again.

The jeering rhyme ‘Tinker, heathen, darkie, thief,’ followed everywhere the three Kendricks went. Yet, Mrs Colquhoun’s carrot-headed brood, including two hulking apprentices, were gallant protectors. Friends with fists; no one dared risk more than jeers.

The streets were shiny-washed with rain, sparkling – dark islands of shit in a silver sea. Every day she saw those who lived in holes, or under a piece of stolen canvas. Barefoot in the dirt, your cuts festered. She remembered how she had raged when the kids’ boots were stolen. Mrs Ashton had replaced them, bless her.

When she could, Maisie took the kids to school, trying to keep up their spirits with the hug at the gate. But Maisie had to earn a living… School had books and posh people’s libraries had more books than any one person could read. She was no more allowed in those than she’d ever be invited to Buckingham Palace.

The steamship and the railway meant you could go most anywhere in the world, balloons could soar above mountains, and submarines even went under the sea. Only eighty days to go round the world. She’d rescued that book from a hawker…

Yet London was the centre of the world – almost a country – with palaces and flophouses, bright taverns and squalid drinking holes, churches and knocking shops, tall warehouses in sooty brick and squat lean-tos. Wood and iron and mud and stone – a cauldron of sweet and bitter, old and new, rich and poor, steam rising and sewers stinking and factories smoking.

One more hug at the gates, and Maisie was free. She ran through shining streets to the Burning Bird, to see what Sal knew. Maisie ran, skirts flying, boots ringing out on the cobbles, herself again. All were about their business.

Streets crowded with horse-drawn buses and drays, a wounded soldier with his barrel organ, and a rough dock prophet on a crate shouting, angry about the End of The World. Roofs dripped and the sparrows played in the puddles.

Everything about Sal was big. She ran the pub like a sergeant major and she could stop a fight with a whistle. ‘Thought you’d come,’ Sal said, dismissing the drayman. ‘Some odd cove asking after your Mrs Ashton last night. Generous with his coin, beers all round, bit of a flirt. An enquiry agent.’

Someone paid to spy?  Maisie could play that game. Beat him at it.

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Questions I’ve Been Asked

Why write this?

My first two books were about a childless couple who adopt a space alien, set in the States, and to the soundtrack of the late Sixties. So it is a change.

I needed to write Mrs Ashton and Braddie – these morally complicated woman, Not just Victorian, late Victorian, as the Empire grow and unrest with it. Many modern ideas were finally stirring.

I was determined to write about the UK and our relationship with our past. I wanted to write older and more morally complex characters.

I really wanted to write a ripping murder mystery, with an established sapphic couple. In these difficult times, I wanted some light and hope.

Also, my agent thought it was the least uncommercial of my ideas.

Why change genre?

The Crooked Medium is like my previous work

-complex female protagonists

-a well realised historical setting

-it’s not quite our world!

-warm, with a touch of humour and centres relationships -friendship, family and found family

-a cracking story which makes you think

Is it Cozy/Cosy – in the genre sense?

Quick answer – The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder isn’t much stronger than Christie or Sayers.

I’m a bit puzzled by the exact cosy boundaries. I read and certainly watch cosy crime.

I prefer my mysteries to be more stories of character than just a pure intellectual puzzle.

If you want murder with absolutely no shock, blood, swearing, or same sex relationships, go elsewhere.

The book is warm and heartfelt, focusing on three women outsiders as sleuths, dealing with a difficult relationship with the police. Mrs Ashton and Braddie have a lively relationship, that they enjoy their marital relations is clear but the book is ‘closed door’.  The violence is not gratuitous.  But I don’t shy away from murder’s mess and the impact of a death on families and communities. Mrs Ashton might be flaky on honesty, and not averse to theft, but she is outraged by murder.

The book is also clear-eyed about the vast gulf between the comfortable and the desperate.  Victorian England was not a chocolate box utopia.

Is there swearing?

I’m afraid both aristocrats and guttersnipes use a few vulgarities but archaisms, no Fs or Cs. An arrogant entitled man uses a misogynist slur about sex workers. We’re not supposed to like him.  I try to avoid racial or ableist terms now seen as offensive even if it is ‘period accurate’.

Mrs Ashton and Braddie have an extremely rude parrot, called Eleanor, who has to be shut in the bedroom when visitors come. Taught by a scurrilous sailor, these include “By John Brown’s manky trews” [dirty or shabby + trousers/pants] “Bertie’s Strumpets” [disrespecting the Prince of Wales’s numerous girlfriends] and a childish, scurrilous comment that Jesus went to the toilet. It upsets Mrs Ashton, who is pious, but she comes to realise that the Jesus she follows and admires walked the earth as a man who ate, drank, slept, got tired, and showed normal human emotions. And probably needed to do what other humans do. And if he did, it doesn’t invalidate his person, his example, or his worth.

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Stephen Cox is a writer living in London.
He’d read every Holmes, Christie, and Sayers before he was 21 and did Holmes
fanfic in school. He has also read the Moonstone six times. With a science
degree he has always been a fan of history and the imagination.

The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder
contains the strong characterisation, women protagonists, authentic period
setting, and wide roaming imagination of his other works.

He says ‘It’s a rip-roaring twisty story,
with relationships under stress and surprising readers at every turn.”

His first two novels, Our Child of the Stars
and Our Child of Two Worlds were called “heartfelt, imaginative and gripping”,
with wide praise in the national press.

Stephen says ‘I wanted female rogues as my
leads – people who lead a crooked life, who need to keep secrets, yet can be
kind and generous too. This is a rigorous detective story with a client in
trouble and old crimes to be solved. It has everything – a brutal man, a Lady
in danger, and the past and present feeding the action. Can these outsiders
possibly win? Queer women certainly existed and made lives together in
Victorian England, as those with eyes to see can see,’

 

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