An
Author's Inspiration
By
Jacqueline Beard
My first foray into adult fiction came
about through the murky pasts of my ancestor's. Other people have illustrious
forebears. Mine are mad, bad and often dangerous to know. And there are plenty
of them, given that my family tree has more than 55,000 individuals and
climbing.
My first book, Vote for Murder, was inspired by the execution of Mary Emily Cage in
1851. Mary was hanged after poisoning her husband James with arsenic, and she
may have killed several of her children. An admitted sinner and adulteress,
Mary denied murdering her husband and went to her death without confessing. She
was vilified by the press who reported every detail of her misconduct without
any consideration for her circumstances. But Mary was a victim of domestic
abuse. James had already been imprisoned for his ill-treatment of her while
under the influence of alcohol. The family were destitute and in desperate
need. In another century, there would have been far more sympathy for her
situation.
Around the same time that I discovered
my relationship (through marriage) to Mary Cage, I also found several
suffragists in my family tree. They were peaceful activists, and their absence
from the 1911 census suggests that they were at the census evasion night in The
Old Museum, Ipswich organised by the prominent Suffolk suffragette Constance
Andrews. I was fascinated by both stories, and they inspired my first adult fiction
novel. Naturally, my protagonist in Vote for Murder is a suffragist, and her
story weaves together with that of Mary's to produce a murder mystery set in
Victorian and Edwardian Suffolk.
After finishing Vote for Murder, I gave myself a year off without thinking too hard
about writing, but my family tree kept growing, and skeleton's continued to
appear. I had long been fascinated by the genealogy of my East Anglian Corben
family including the name variants Corbin and Corbyn. Having made a tenuous
link back to Corbyn's in the late 1400s, I found a more recent connection
(again by marriage) to Mary Corbyn of Fressingfield. Mary was rumoured to be a
witch. Now, an accusation of witchcraft was not unusual in the 1600s, but a
rarity in the 1890s. The basis of the allegation was the death of Mary's
grandchild, which was reported in the press as follows:
Alleged Witchcraft in Suffolk. At an
inquest held at Fressingfield on Thursday by Mr C W Chaston on the body of a
child named Hammond aged 11, weeks, daughter of a labourer, the father and
mother stated that they believed the death of the Child was due to the
witchcraft of Mrs Corbyn, the Child's step-grandmother. This woman died a few
hours before the Child and stated that the Child would not live long after her.
The Child was taken out, and the father stated that he saw smoke issue from its
perambulator and that the Child died upon being taken home, the mother stating
that it was hot and dry, and smelt of brimstone. The medical evidence went to
show that death was due to shock caused by the external application of some
irritant, and the jury, in returning a verdict in accordance with the medical
evidence said there was not sufficient evidence to show the nature of the
irritant. George Corbyn said he was of the opinion that his late wife had the
powers of a witch, and he always tried to do what she wanted in consequence.
I couldn't resist using this story as
the starting point for the first of my Lawrence Harpham mystery novels, The Fressingfield Witch. A crime had occurred, but without
evidence, there was no one to bring to justice. My book would have been very
short, but for one thing. Fressingfield already had a witch.
Faith Mills was a victim of witchcraft
accusations from the Suffolk Witch Trials of the 1640s. She was one of the
unfortunate women executed on the strength of allegations made by Matthew
Hopkins and his Suffolk born colleague, John Stearne. The two men arrived in
Fressingfield during the Witch Hunts and stoked up fear of the supernatural in
the hope of personal gain. This genuine terror of witchcraft escalated in an
atmosphere influenced by religion, politics and the civil war. The victims were
mostly, though not always, women and they were exploited by Hopkins and Stearne
who deliberately targeted the poor, vulnerable, marginalised or different.
Once again, my book combined stories set
in two different eras, this time involving Private Investigator Lawrence
Harpham and his business partner Violet Smith.
By the time I began writing the sequel,
I was running out of interesting relatives and had started using historical
newspapers as the basis for my stories. There is nothing quite as strange as
real life, and I have found crimes covered in newspaper articles to be
excellent sources of inspiration. The Ripper Deception, Book two in my series, was created
from three separate newspaper stories. One featured a miser's death; one
involved a haunted rectory and the final report described the inquest of
Frances Coles who may or may not have been a victim of Jack the Ripper.
Together, these three true stories created an unusual twist on a common
theme.
I have recently published a Christmas
short story, The Montpellier Mystery, and the next full-length book in the Lawrence Harpham series, The
Scole Confession, is due out early next year. Both books rely heavily on
newspaper coverage of actual events. Both are set in recognisable English towns
and those readers so inclined, can identify the real people who were involved
in the accounts. If they look closely, they may even find them in their family
trees!
Jacqueline Beard
Jacqueline Beard is a writer and
genealogist living in Gloucestershire with an East Anglian ancestry going back
to the 1500s. She writes Victorian murder mysteries and is currently working on
the third book in the Lawrence Harpham series. Jacqueline's books are a mixture
of true crime and fiction inspired by local newspaper reports. When Jacqueline
is not writing or researching "dead people" as her husband so
charmingly puts it, she is usually walking in the glorious Cotswolds with her
Cockapoo, Teddy. Jacqueline loves technology and spends far too much time on
her computer. She dislikes flying, dentists and balloons - especially red ones.
Connect with Jacqueline:
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