Ask the Author: Janet Roger
Answered Questions (6)
Janet Roger
I was interested to think back and find this out myself. Thank you for asking Bruno. I started by looking at my reviews on Goodreads - and what a mixed bag they are – ranging from Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion); Maigret’s Memoirs (Georges Simenon); Mahoney Reconsidered (David Van Zanten); The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and Monet’s Impression Sunrise (Marianne Mathieu).
But I travel a lot and often my choice of reading is determined by which country I find myself in. For example I came across Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy in a bookshop in Bucharest, which is where her story begins. So how could I not read it? And many years ago, in a hotel room in Swaziland of all places, I browsed the first couple of chapters of Dr. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Then on a chance visit to second-hand bookstore on quite another continent, there it was again, and so of course I snapped it up. Serendipity. You just can’t beat it.
For influential authors let me start with Raymond Chandler. My noir crime thriller Shamus Dust tips its hat to the novels of Chandler in all sorts of ways. After all it’s a dark take on city crime, corruption and a series of murders set in 1947, when not only Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mysteries but the entirely new form of film noir were both hitting their stride. But it also owes much to Charles Dickens, with his well-observed, powerful descriptions of the seedy underbelly of London with more than its fair share of murderous thieves and villains from the gutter to the government - a hundred years before my own story begins.
But I travel a lot and often my choice of reading is determined by which country I find myself in. For example I came across Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy in a bookshop in Bucharest, which is where her story begins. So how could I not read it? And many years ago, in a hotel room in Swaziland of all places, I browsed the first couple of chapters of Dr. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Then on a chance visit to second-hand bookstore on quite another continent, there it was again, and so of course I snapped it up. Serendipity. You just can’t beat it.
For influential authors let me start with Raymond Chandler. My noir crime thriller Shamus Dust tips its hat to the novels of Chandler in all sorts of ways. After all it’s a dark take on city crime, corruption and a series of murders set in 1947, when not only Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mysteries but the entirely new form of film noir were both hitting their stride. But it also owes much to Charles Dickens, with his well-observed, powerful descriptions of the seedy underbelly of London with more than its fair share of murderous thieves and villains from the gutter to the government - a hundred years before my own story begins.
Janet Roger
I'm afraid I have not read any of his work Mark.
Writing historical fiction means a of research and that takes a lot of my time. That in turn means my list of other books to read keeps on growing, But I have to admit I do love all that history of London ...
Writing historical fiction means a of research and that takes a lot of my time. That in turn means my list of other books to read keeps on growing, But I have to admit I do love all that history of London ...
Janet Roger
Thank you for asking Mark. I'm delighted to know you're waiting to read another of my novels.
There is a sequel under way. It’s set in London the summer of ’48, ties up some loose ends and develops some characters from Shamus Dust. There are a couple of connection planted in Shamus Dust, though you really need to know your Chandler to spot them. But that said, the new book gives Newman an entirely new case and will stand alone.
It’s been interesting deciding which characters to revisit, how fleeting or important they’ll be, and of course, how to introduce them to readers who don’t already know them from the earlier story.
There is a sequel under way. It’s set in London the summer of ’48, ties up some loose ends and develops some characters from Shamus Dust. There are a couple of connection planted in Shamus Dust, though you really need to know your Chandler to spot them. But that said, the new book gives Newman an entirely new case and will stand alone.
It’s been interesting deciding which characters to revisit, how fleeting or important they’ll be, and of course, how to introduce them to readers who don’t already know them from the earlier story.
Janet Roger
That's right Jason. It was a window opened on that lost Roman arena. In the blitzed London of the early postwar it was stumbled on in the north of the City, on a construction site close by the current (vast) Barbican development. But the window closed again, and the coliseum’s existence - it’s an arena the size of a football field - simply got overlooked (!). The mistake is explained today as just one of those things, an oversight that went unnoticed until 1988, when the archaeological record was examined again. Once rediscovered, the Roman amphitheater was excavated for more than a decade, then opened to the public in a spectacular new gallery below ground (don’t miss it on a trip to London). Shamus Dust, of course, fills out the story differently. It goes back to those Cold War years, when rebuilding the City was up for grabs and fortunes were staked on the coming construction boom. In this telling, the real estate interests include high-end racketeers as well as corrupt City grandees, who think any delay on construction will be very bad karma indeed. Cue that monumental discovery on a construction site that no-one will get to hear of. Cue the apparent vice killing that gets Shamus Dust under way. And then cue the hardboiled gumshoe who gets hired as part of the cover-up.
Janet Roger
Well, thank you so much for asking Jason.
Let me start with the City. Shamus Dust is set there at Christmas 1947, when - as it still is - the City of London was financial heart of the capital, often simply known as the Square Mile. Think of it as London’s Wall Street. In fact, it genuinely is, even now, the more or less single square mile contained inside the arc of London’s ancient Roman walls, with the Thames running along its southern boundary.
What drew me, was living and working there for a long time. You can walk the whole City very easily, and if you do that you inevitably get up close to its geography and history.
As for period, those early years of Cold War fascinate me in general. But in the City something very special happens. It had taken a hammering in the London blitz. Hundreds of its acres - some of the most valuable real estate on the planet - were flattened rubble. Which made it archaeologists’ dreamland. For a few short years, digging in those blitz sites gave them unimagined access to the two-thousand years old Roman city right beneath their feet. They wasted no time. Before reconstruction got seriously under way they’d made monumental discoveries: a Roman temple, a Roman fortress on the line of the wall, even the foundations of an arena - a Roman coliseum, no less. And there was the puzzle. The discovery of the temple and the fortress made instant splash headlines. Yet London’s very own Roman coliseum - yes, there really is one - got overlooked. Seriously, it completely escaped notice for the next almost forty years. Which started me wondering what the story was…
Let me start with the City. Shamus Dust is set there at Christmas 1947, when - as it still is - the City of London was financial heart of the capital, often simply known as the Square Mile. Think of it as London’s Wall Street. In fact, it genuinely is, even now, the more or less single square mile contained inside the arc of London’s ancient Roman walls, with the Thames running along its southern boundary.
What drew me, was living and working there for a long time. You can walk the whole City very easily, and if you do that you inevitably get up close to its geography and history.
As for period, those early years of Cold War fascinate me in general. But in the City something very special happens. It had taken a hammering in the London blitz. Hundreds of its acres - some of the most valuable real estate on the planet - were flattened rubble. Which made it archaeologists’ dreamland. For a few short years, digging in those blitz sites gave them unimagined access to the two-thousand years old Roman city right beneath their feet. They wasted no time. Before reconstruction got seriously under way they’d made monumental discoveries: a Roman temple, a Roman fortress on the line of the wall, even the foundations of an arena - a Roman coliseum, no less. And there was the puzzle. The discovery of the temple and the fortress made instant splash headlines. Yet London’s very own Roman coliseum - yes, there really is one - got overlooked. Seriously, it completely escaped notice for the next almost forty years. Which started me wondering what the story was…
Janet Roger
Well, I always did find that financial square mile - the City of London - exhilarating, but in 1988 something rather special happened there. Stop for a second and imagine you’ve got an absolute fortune riding on commercial real estate development, somewhere near to Wall Street. The ground is cleared, foundations are being dug out, and one day you get a call. It says everything is on hold, because excavations on the site have uncovered the first Viking settlement on Manhattan island! No kidding, something like that happens fairly regularly in the City, notably since reconstruction began after the blitz of World War 2. Today it can happen whenever a new subway is cut, or the latest, tallest skyscraper needs deeper foundations. In the square mile, the layers go right down to the original Roman settlement of London, and in 1988, a routine excavation for Guildhall’s new art gallery hit the jackpot. What the archaeologists found were signs of an amphitheater - think of the Colosseum in Rome itself - in the shape of an oval the size of a football field! Amazing. And it took another twenty years to preserve the remains in a spectacular gallery of their own. But it turns out those remains had first been recorded almost forty years before, when postwar reconstruction was first getting under way. The significance of what the archaeologists found, it was said, just hadn’t been spotted at the time. It set me thinking about the immense sums that were at risk - and the huge temptation to a cover-up - if the significance of the find had been appreciated. Only last year in Athens, for example, some ancient Greek remains were simply trucked out of a construction site (it’s assumed) and dumped overnight in a dry riverbed. Where the original site might have been, no-one could tell. Shamus Dust tells the story of another kind of cover-up at the outset of the Cold War. But in the most valuable square mile on the planet, the need is more urgent, the stakes are deadly, and the solution is nastier by far.
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