What is your novel Foul Trade about?
It is March 1920 and May Keaps, the Poplar Coroner’s Officer, has never failed to provide a jury with sufficient evidence to arrive at a just verdict. And the poverty, drunken fights between visiting sailors, drug trafficking, and criminal gangs haunting the shadows of the busiest docks in the world mean that the courtroom sees more than its fair share of sudden and unnatural deaths. May relishes the responsibility placed upon her but there are many who believe it’s an unsuitable job for a woman and the position should be given to one of the soldiers back from the Great War. Even May begins to wonder if that shouldn’t be the case when the discovery of a young man’s body in a Limehouse alley plunges her into an underworld of opium dens, illegal gambling, drug dealers’ turf wars, the protection rackets of the notorious Bow Kum Tong, and murder. As her investigations draw her into deeper danger it becomes increasingly clear that whoever is responsible intends to avoid the hangman’s noose by arranging to have May laid out on one of her own mortuary slabs.
May Keaps is a fearless and determined character. What inspired you to create her?
I knew I wanted to set Foul Trade in 1920 and also that it would be peopled by the underclass rather than upper-class flappers. So May had to be a working girl with lots of nous but little formal education who investigated murder for a living. But in what capacity? The obvious occupations of police inspector, pathologist or lawyer were all impossible if I wanted it to be historically accurate for a woman of her time. And I did.
It was when I was tearing my hair out over the problem with a writing buddy that I hit on the job of coroner’s officer. They needed no qualifications, it wasn’t a legally-constituted role so the coroner could designate anyone (one incumbent in Poplar had been the local undertaker) and given the shortage of men after the Great War it was conceivable a woman could have been appointed. Plus – and this was crucial – May had experienced the horrors at The Front as an ambulance driver and so was not only intimately acquainted with death and violence, she actively needed the threat of danger to make her feel alive. It was the same for many veterans of the Great War: survivor’s guilt I suppose we’d call it now.
In my research I couldn’t find proof positive that there ever had been a female coroner’s officer, but I only found any details of two men in the role anyway – the aforementioned Poplar undertaker and Coroner Oswald’s officer who was a serving policeman given light duties because of his bad chest. A coroner’s officer wasn’t important enough to merit a mention in memoirs or newspaper reports, and as this was also true of the contribution made by women to public life, it made the role feel perfectly appropriate for May.
The setting of 1920s London feels so atmospheric. What drew you to this time period?
The era has an irresistible pull for me. It was a time of unprecedented loss and discovery, change and upheaval, political posturing and broken promises. And the parallels with the world we live in today – the expanding gap between rich and poor; class division; the ever-present threat of war; xenophobia and racism; the power of the Establishment; mass unemployment – are astounding, forcing me to remember the Director of the British Museum’s words: “If you think carefully about the past, you will be able to think differently about the present.” On a more frivolous level I’ve always been entranced by 1920’s architecture, culture, music, modes of transport, Art Deco ceramics, clothes, and bright, brash advertising ephemera.
Surviving the Great War and living in its long shadow makes the characters in Foul Trade who they are, every one damaged either physically, psychologically or emotionally. Which brings me on to something very personal: there’s a large part of me that would like to know how I would have been similarly affected. What must it been like to face a future irrevocably altered by a cataclysmic event, the ramifications of which we, with our current sensibilities, can’t possibly comprehend? The prevalence of rolling news and frontline reportage influences our responses to the wars of our time even as they happen whereas, instead of information, Britain in the 1920s was flooded with a sort of collective amnesia which made individuals keep their experiences private, and worked to deny on-going suffering: Wilfred Owen wrote his poems of remembrance to awaken his contemporaries. And, over a century on, I try to honour the people who lived through those dark times in my fiction.
Your novel blends historical fiction with mystery and suspense. How do you research such a rich and detailed world?
I had set part of an apprenticeship novel in Poplar so had already been drawn to the area and when I combined that with a dockland community being the perfect place in which to set plots of intrigue because of its wide variety of people, the location for Foul Trade didn’t need a second thought. I started my research by studying the 1914 Ordinance Survey map where I discovered the Coroner’s Court was on Poplar High Street with the Limehouse Chinese Quarter within walking distance, the East India Docks a stone’s throw away, and both the hospital and the police station nearby. So in they came to the plot. The street directory on the reverse revealed the names and locations of the pubs, typical shops and businesses, and municipal buildings. The map was a gold mine in helping me build May’s world.
The detailed research came from the New Survey of London Life and Labour which catalogued the industries and contained statistics and summaries of the living conditions and plight of the poor. My greatest find – and the one piece of research that brought everything together – was in the Museum of London Docklands: the 1919 diary of a 15-year-old dock messenger boy, Oscar Kirk. He wrote down the sort of things every boy would find noteworthy – divers salvaging in Limehouse Basin; a chemical works’ fire; watching a Charlie Chaplin film; letting off a cordite cartridge he’d bought; being chased out of the sack sheds by a policeman. But he also included remarkably touching details of his ordinary life.
I found on-line and in books lots of photographs of magnificent barques, three-masted schooners and costal wherries – all as common a sight as steam ships in the 1920s – as well as those of paddle steamers (“shilling sicks” J. B. Priestley memorably called them) and huge ocean-going liners. All added a romantic backdrop to the world I was creating.
But, overall, the streets in the thunderous shadows of the high walls were grim. They stank. Just imagine a combination of tanneries, paint and varnish works, breweries, gasworks, rubber manufacturers, jam and pickle factories, sheds of ripening bananas, sugar, sulphur from match matching, spices, coffee, rum, sawn wood, coal dust . . . and that’s not to mention the refuse rotting in the mud at low tide, horse manure lining the streets, and the odour emanating from backyard privies and overcrowded slums.
And all of that is just a fraction of what I had to learn about my chosen setting before I could start writing the book. Added to which I also needed a taste of what it felt like to walk in May’s shoes so I read the contemporary accounts and pseudo-reportage, as well as oral history collected from the men and women who lived and worked there.
How long did all this research take me? Months, and months, and months. It seemed there was no end to Poplar’s hidden secrets. Throughout the writing of Foul Trade I was constantly adding extra touches of light and shade as I uncovered new information. Frustrating, yes. But I loved every moment of it.
May works in a male-dominated field and faces many challenges. Was it important for you to highlight women’s roles in this era?
Women’s voices are often lost to history, and that’s doubly true for working class women. They didn’t write books or produce memoirs or spend their mornings writing witty letters which were kept for posterity. They got on with life, because they had to. And it is these ordinary lives that speak to me as a woman standing on the shoulders of their experience, but as a writer they illuminate the world of the past in a way that is easy to relate to.
In, and after, the Great War, women had to adapt and reinvent themselves in a society that didn’t regard them as having any workforce skills (and most didn’t) but were useful because they could take the place of the men who had gone off to fight or who were never coming home.
There are some startingly photographs of women turning their hands and talents to all sorts of things – tarring roads, sweeping chimneys, repairing steam engines, driving buses and tube trains, ploughing the land – in addition to the lethal work in munitions factories that cut short so many female lives with appalling diseases and cancers. All, by the way, for far less money than the men had been paid. Then, to top it all, when the men did come back, the women were told they weren’t wanted anymore and should return to the kitchen sink and having babies. But how could they? Would you want to give up the independence and freedom we now take for granted?
If I sound angry, it’s because I am. It was a shameful way to treat the unsung heroes who prevented a wartime Britain from grinding to a halt; notwithstanding the returning veterans needed employment, the women didn’t have to be crushed and belittled in the process. May is my antidote to that perfunctory dismissal. She battles to prove herself worthy of being counted as valuable for who she is, rather than discarded because she is of the wrong gender. Thankfully, there were many, many real women who refused to be ridden roughshod over, and May is my tribute to them.
Crime, corruption, and the dark underworld of London play a big part in the story. What was the most fascinating thing you learned while researching?
That there is nothing new under the sun. So very little has changed in the prevalence of crime and corruption – I guess because human nature has always remained constant.
London’s East End has always had a sorry reputation for gun and knife crime. Back in the 1920s it was commonplace (there were a lot of contraband weapons floating around after the Great War) even when the punishment for murder was hanging. Racially aggravated violence between and towards the docklands’ many immigrant and transient communities; stealing from the docks and smuggling from ships; the general crime and violence of disaffected people horribly traumatised by the mass slaughter of war. Things were tough. A vast number of men were employed by the day with long periods of no money coming in; women worked in the lowest-paid factory jobs often caring for elderly relatives and raising children at the same time. Many of them, of course, had been recently widowed. I’m not for one minute implying that everyone indulged in criminality but when opportunities presented themselves, most wouldn’t turn up the chance of being able to eat well for a week.
What I was surprised by in my research into the dark underworld of Poplar and Limehouse was the power of the street drugs gangs. The Chinese Tong were the most ruthless and well-organised. They dealt in smuggled opium and cocaine; bribed local police, judges and magistrates; defended their turf with extreme violence; threatened and killed everyone who got in their way. We would recognise the newspaper headlines today.
In Foul Trade I was never interested in glamorising – or normalising – the criminal underbelly of 1920’s London docklands, but I did want to reflect life as so many ordinary people experienced it.
Do you have a favorite scene in Foul Trade – one that was especially fun or challenging to write?
My favourite scenes to write where those set in my fictional theatre, the Gaiety.
I’ve always been fascinated by old theatres as buildings, the closeted artificially of backstage life, and the rise and decline of Music Hall as mass entertainment. I remember being taken to Hackney Empire when it was about to be restored and although it was a sad neglected place, the flaking walls and threadbare plush seats still held traces of magic and it was easy to imagine what it must’ve been like to be on stage holding a packed-out Saturday night audience in the palm of your hand. It was something of that atmosphere I was trying to recreate with the Gaiety.
I had to do a lot of research to get the period right. Historical accuracy is very important to me because if I’m not convinced of the authenticity of the worlds I create, then how can I expect a reader to be? I read contemporary theatre memoirs; The Stage Year Book of 1914 and 1919; the lives of some of the greatest stars of the boards – Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley, Little Tich, Dan Leno – and everything written on the subject by the wonderfully opinionated J. B. Priestley. I also found some brilliant resources on-line relating to the East End theatres of the day in general and, specifically, the Queen’s and Hippodrome in Poplar.
All this I steeped myself in until I had absorbed enough to feel as though I had lived backstage in a former life, then I set about having fun making things up. Like the stage turns and details of their acts. I did enjoy causing chaos with the poodles. But my favourite bit of theatre business in Foul Trade is true and included as a tribute to all those long-dead performers who sweated blood to inject a moment of fantasy into the lives of people even more poor and downtrodden than themselves. The great Walter Aubrey really did leave the stage after dying a death and announced to the wings: “I’m off to pee on my props, and sod the profession.”.
The novel has a strong sense of justice. What message do you hope readers take away from May’s journey?
That is such a good question because I don’t think I set out to say anything explicit about justice. May, of course, is part of the justice system and therefore heavily involved in crime and punishment but her values are built on what is morally right rather than what is illegal. Her job was to gather information and evidence concerning sudden and unnatural deaths on behalf of the Poplar Coroner, and as a British Parliamentary Committee reported in 1914, most coroners considered their chief function to be the detection and prevention of crime. So May was conducting the sorts of investigations undertaken by our modern police forces, not pointing a finger or making judgements. Her justice was getting to the truth of what people told her.
May was born and raised in London docklands so she had firsthand knowledge of how hard things are and the everyday compromises people must make in order to have any sort of a decent life. She accepts packets of coffee beans docker friends have pilfered from split sacks; she doesn’t turn her back on prostitutes forced to work the streets to feed their children when most report them to the police; she understands that the money from smuggling and stealing is often the only thing keeping people out of the workhouse. That’s not to say May approves of breaking the law, she simply knows it is a necessary fact of life for those on the bottom rung of society.
So I guess what I’m saying the message I want readers to take away from May’s journey is that the law and what is morally right aren’t always one and the same thing. Police on her Poplar streets arrest shell-shocked veterans for vagrancy because the men can no longer hold down a job, but the slum landlords who make fortunes by evicting families so they can put up the rents aren’t doing anything illegal. Immoral, yes, but not against the then law. Morality is in the big picture of how society treats its most disadvantaged, and for someone like May who knows that many of the unnatural deaths she comes across are a product of deprivation and poverty, the emphasis on meting out justice to the already unfairly punished can feel unjust.
What was the most surprising or unexpected part of writing this book?
What I didn’t expect to uncover during my ongoing research for Foul Trade was how rooted people were in their own particular East End community. Their lives revolved around wherever they lived and worked; a handful of streets away could be as good as foreign territory. The numerous immigrant communities from countries all over the world had their own shops, pubs, clubs, churches, and sailors’ lodging houses but it wasn’t segregation, more a case of if you had no reason to go anywhere else to get what you wanted or needed, why would you? The place where Poplar was truly tribal was on the Isle of Dogs, that kink in the River Thames that had once been called Stepney Marsh. Cut off from the ‘mainland’ by the West India Docks and separated from each other by stretches of water, Millwall and Cubitt Town considered themselves entirely separate villages rather than squashed together between docks and factories and warehouses and cow-grazed marshy fields.
All this meant that when I was writing Foul Trade I had to remember that people didn’t just jump on a tram or a bus or a tube – although they could, of course – to go somewhere we would think of as easily accessible. I had to shrink the boundaries of my novelistic world to the boundaries that existed in the minds of the people who really lived there.
There was one thing that astounded me when I could finally get to grips with it: the size of the dock complexes in Poplar. They were huge. The walls around the West India Import and Export Docks were over 30ft (9 metres) high and enclosed a total of 62 acres (250,905 square metres) of water. The East India Docks were marginally smaller but still occupied over 60 acres with just over a half of it covered by water. These were the main dock complexes but when you added in all the others it was a town within a city. It is impossible to appreciate that now when so much of the London docklands has been bombed, demolished, redeveloped, filled-in, and generally vanished. Were anyone living in 1920’s Poplar to be transported forward they wouldn’t recognise their borough as the same place.