Brian Thompson was born in London in 1935 and now lives in Oxford. He has written two award-winning volumes of memoir: Keeping Mum (2006), winner of the Costa Prize for Biography and the PEN/Ackerley Prize, and Clever Girl (2007), longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. More recently, he has written two two volumes in the Bella Wallis series of mysteries.

Bella Wallis is a respectable society woman with a secret identity: in an office buried deep within the seedy backstreets of London, she writes sensationalist novels exposing the scoundrels that litter high society under the pen name Henry Ellis Margam. She first appeared in The Widows’s Secret, and the in the follow-up The Captain’s Table. She can be found blogging here, and you can read Jennie’s review of The Captain’s Table here.

We caught up with Brian to ask him about his writing, and why he chose to set his mystery novels in Victorian England…

We always ask: are you a bookgeek?

I have about a thousand books in the house. Very few of them are fiction  and none of them literary novels, a genre that fills me with despair. I have just finished reading, with suitable awe, The Reach of Rome by  Derek Williams (1996), an exemplary piece of historical scholarship. Before that , Simon Sebag Montefiore on Stalin and before that, James Thurber.  So yes, that kind  of geekiness.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing?

Yes, about three people, all of them women, all of them happily unaware of the compliment, if it is one. When I started to write the Bella Wallis series I was very anxious about creating a heroine at all, for fear of attracting femininist displeasure in some way or another. I have been amazed by how much women take to Bella. It helps to have a brilliant editor in Clara Farmer, overseeing the series at Chatto & Windus. I would say she is the presiding genius of the whole affair.

What’s best piece of writing advice you’ve heard?

In a film called Dad, with Ted Danson playing the exasperated son of  a garrulous Jack Lemmon, there is a scene where Lemmon tells some complicated story about a baseball game where a rookie player saved the day.  ‘And what did that teach you, Dad ?’ Danson asks wearily. Lemmon studies his son with  the watery eyes of a frail old man. ‘It taught me that anything’s possible if you turn up for work.’ Just so.

Where do you write?

I have a single storey office attached to the house and write at a desk I bought from bankrupt office stock piled higgledy-piggledy in a farmyard barn. To one side is a ruined sofa which doubles as a filing cabinet. Untidy is a weak adjective to describe these arrangements. Just outside the window is a green plastic water butt with something of the Dalek about it . Maybe I am really writing to please him. Certainly I feel him watching me with no overt signs of encouragement. In some lights he seems to scowl. On occasions, snigger.

What are you working on at the moment?

The fourth and last Bella. I am also doodling with a  novel that recounts the three entirely plausible moments when Freud met Hitler. And this will be my swansong, I think – a leisurely one , it is to be hoped.

Why did you pick Victorian times as your milieu? It puts a lot of constraints on the characters and their relationships (and they are clearly “ahead of their time” socially, morally, and emotionally).

I’m interested why you should think that historical fiction must always betray a modern sensibility in its authors. That can’t be true of Patrick O’Brian for example; nor yet of  George Macdonald Fraser. A favourite author of mine is  Thomas Kenneally- the list goes on . I write about Victorian times at the moment that the sentimental idyll was being replaced  by a more realistic and hardheaded point of view. If you like , in the last of candlelight and at the beginning of  electricity-lit squalor.

The “character” of the writer-detective is a tried and true one, what drew you to it?

The whole point about Bella is that her published novels fall into the genre of  what were called  in those days ‘sensationalist fiction.’ These books were the lies that masked  an uncomfortable reality – that outside their pages, (even in the 70’s) , the century was dying . I wanted to find a cast of characters that in one way or another understood and reflected this.  They could be sure of one thing – that nothing about them  was represented in contemporary fiction.  The series is also about love in its various guises , a story that hardly changes from generation to generation.

Where, in the world, did Captain Quigley come from?

The immediate source for Captain Quigley was my grandfather, who was born just as this series ends. He too had a soubriquet – Jockie – and was an incurably facetious and sardonic cockney shortarse whose party trick was to eat the buttons from his shirt , his fly buttons and -  as a final flourish – his bootlaces. Captain Quigley would have been quite at home with Pistol, Bardolph and Nym in the Agincourt camp and so too would my grandfather. There’s a kind of heroic ineptitude in such characters that ( he said gravely) keeps the world sane.

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