When the body of a young man is found stuffed into the tomb of a medieval knight, Parish Constable Daniel Haze is tasked with investigating his first solo murder case. Suspicion instantly falls on the only stranger to arrive in the village of Birch Hill just before the crime took place, but the American captain proves to be an unexpected asset. A former soldier and a skilled surgeon, Jason Redmond is not only willing to assist Haze with the investigation but will risk
his own safety to apprehend the killer.
When I was invited to discuss my latest release, I initially thought I’d talk about The Lost Colony, which is a bit of a departure for me. I loved writing this twisty psychological thriller, but I’m better known for historical murder mysteries, and the series readers are most familiar with is the Redmond and Haze mysteries. Murder of a Hangman, A Redmond and Haze Mystery Book 13 was just released in January, and the next instalment, Murder of Innocents, is coming in October.
Although I started my career writing time travel and Gothic romance, I eventually gravitated toward writing murder mysteries. Some might think I have a fascination with murder, but the truth is that the murder itself is secondary. What I really enjoy is creating an intricate puzzle where the pieces do not easily fit together and the big picture is not complete until the final clue is in place. And given my love of all things historical, naturally all my series are set in the past, in this instance the foggy, gaslit streets of Victorian England.
My protagonists, Jason Redmond and Daniel Haze, are as different as two men can be, with each man bringing a unique brand of reasoning and justice to the investigations. At the start of the series, Daniel Haze is a parish constable. He’s steadfast and conscientious, and not at all the sort of person to question social constraints imposed by a closed-minded and rigid society.
Jason Redmond is an American doctor who served as a Union Army captain during the American Civil War and spent a year in Andersonville Confederate Prison. Having been raised in a country that celebrates equality and democracy, Jason has mixed feelings about claiming the title and an estate that are his due, but as the only surviving descendant of a noble family, he can hardly refuse to honor his legacy.
Jason is intelligent, courageous, and all too aware of life’s injustices and the age-old prejudices that govern polite society. He is not afraid to speak his mind or question the status quo, nor is he disdainful of the common people who turn to him for help, his philanthropy turning his peers against him.
Although there is an ever-changing cast of supporting characters, Victorian England is a character in itself, the time period setting the stage for not only some truly puzzling crimes but also friction between the two men.
I have been fascinated with Victorian England since I was a child and read my first Sherlock Holmes story. There are those who romanticize the era and imagine a life that was charming and quaint, but the nineteenth century had a dark side, its misery and danger personified in readers’ minds by characters like Oliver Twist and Jack the Ripper.
Victorian England was riddled with crime, plagued by poverty, and governed by people who didn’t care to waste resources on protecting its most vulnerable citizens. London was truly a study in contrasts, with some living in glittering opulence and others struggling to survive, often preferring to live on the streets than accept the hospitality of London’s many orphanages and workhouses, since those establishments were a ticket to an early grave.
It was during this time that a fledgling police force was just coming into its own, the newly minted detectives relying on their own wits, experience, and underworld informers to apprehend criminals who were as clever as they were numerous. Victorian policemen had virtually no training, carried no firearms, and were too few to police a metropolis the size of London. Crime scene photography was just coming into use, and fingerprinting suspects was still years away. It was a time when all a policeman had to rely on was his courage and powers of deduction, and he wasn’t expected to adhere to established procedure. In other words, the absolute perfect time to set a mystery series since anything went.
As attached as I am to the time period and setting, one ever-present challenge of writing Victorian mysteries is maintaining historical accuracy. I am forever looking up customs, inventions, and period-appropriate phrases, but the one area of research that always takes me down the proverbial rabbit hole is nineteenth-century medicine, which was way scarier than I ever imagined and remembered for filthy instruments, brutal amputations without anesthetic, a complete disregard for patients, and a stubborn refusal to learn or evolve that led to countless deaths that could have been avoided even by the simple act of handwashing.
Some of the hardest scenes to write focus on street children and prostitutes, who were achingly young and horribly mistreated and made up a surprisingly large percentage of the population. Thousands of children were orphaned and lived on the streets, and countless women fell into prostitution and were shunned by a society that chose to brand them as lascivious and immoral rather than acknowledge that these women were struggling to survive and try to help them.
In the course of their investigations, my protagonists encounter individuals from all walks of life and find themselves not only in the grand drawing rooms of the nobility but in some of London’s worst slums and crime-infested rookeries. The unlikely duo goes on to solve multiple murders, each man relying on his beliefs and life experiences to unravel the most baffling of mysteries. As the series evolves, Jason and Daniel experience upheaval in their personal lives and learn much from each other, especially in situations where their partnership is sorely tested.
Although I’m still working on new instalments of Redmond and Haze, I have recently started a new Victorian mystery series, the Tate and Bell Mysteries. This new duo is a pairing of a Crimean War nurse and a rather jaded detective who secretly dreams of leaving it all behind and going to America, where he just might join the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
Gemma Tate and Sebastian Bell are very different from Daniel Haze and Jason Redmond, their views and methods unique to their experiences and standing in society. The first book in the series, The Highgate Cemetery Murder, was released on February 29, 2024, with book two, The Murder at Traitor’s Gate, coming in June 2024. I hope you will check them out.
Irina Shapiro
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