Dead Image (An Inspector Best Mystery) - Softcover

Lock, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752464558 ISBN 13: 9780752464558

Publisher: The History Press, 2012

Synopsis

The first book in an exciting series is a dramatic Victorian murder case set against a historic London tragedy

The explosion was heard 20 miles away. It killed boatmen and wrecked the exotic villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John's Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regents Park explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal? And whose was the other body found in the canal? An artist's model? The missing King’s Cross barmaid? Or another victim of the so-called Thames murderer? As he struggles to find the answers, Scotland Yard's Sergeant Ernest Best straddles the conflicting worlds of art, wealth, and privilege and that of the poverty-stricken canal boatmen in an intriguing mystery that will change his life forever.

About this title

From the Author

DEAD IMAGE was to be my first crime novel.  i was an ex-police officer and had been a  member of the Crime Writer's Association for many years on the strength of my non-fiction police/crime books. Indeed, for ten of those I had written Locklines (a page of police procedural info mainly culled from various police magazines) for RED HERRINGS the CWA magazine. So, no problem?  Er - yes.
    Alas, I now felt I had been out of touch with the real thing for so long I would not be able to sustain a police procedural for a whole novel and I do like to get it right.  An added impediment; I wasn't sure I had sufficient imagination despite having written a few short stories and radio plays. And, though I had honed my dialogue skills on the radio plays my plotting still left a lot to be desired
     I made three decisions about those problems.
     1. I would set the book in the Victorian era having written a good deal about crime and detection back  then.
     2. I would set it against the background of a real life disaster/mystery - which would give me a backbone - then add my own crime puzzle.
     3. The real life disaster would be the mysterious Regent's Park Explosion of  1874 when a canal boat exploded as it was passing under a bridge. For my own mystery I would add another body to those unfortunate boatmen who had been killed - that of an anonymous young woman .
    I was assisted by two fortuitous facts: I had recently been on a canal boat holiday on an upper part of that same canal (a prize won in a competition in the Met Police's magazine The Job) and the London Canal Museum was just down the road from me. A huge amount of research still to do but thus was born DEAD IMAGE and the handsome and charismatic Detective Sergeant Ernest Best whose job it would be to solve this puzzling case.

About the Author

Joan Lock is an ex-policewoman and the author of eight non-fiction books. She has been a regular contributor to the police press and the journal of the Crime Writers' Association.

About this edition

• Publisher: The History Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0752464558
• ISBN 13: 9780752464558
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192