Originally, I had no plan to write historical fiction. To be honest, I had no plan to write fiction at all. I had put a manuscript in a drawer at the age of 25 (or the modern equivalent – anow-defunct floppy disk), and there it had stayed. I knew from my career in publishing (with George Allen & Unwin, then – and still – with HarperCollins) that writing a novel – any novel – was extremely hard work and that the gap between conception and page felt to me then unbridgeable.
I had spent most of my years in publishing commissioning and editing fiction. I specialised in science fiction and fantasy, but also published across crime, thrillers, historical and literary fiction, and had seen at least at second hand how my writers worked. I saw how the crime and thriller writers scoured the newspapers, befriended members of the local police force, coroners and forensic scientists, and focused their research through the prism of those sources. SF writers often read the work of scientists on the cutting edge of their disciplines and let their
