Author Douglas Skelton: Historians may frown, but I’m a storyteller

Edinburgh Castle From The Grass-Market. From The Original Painting By Lt. Col. Batty, 1832. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Shutterstock

Picture this: The United Kingdom is in turmoil. The old queen has died, there is a new king, mistrust of political figures, suggestions of corruption and self-interest among the ruling elite and, in Scotland, bitter divisions between those who support the Union and those who don’t.

Current affairs?

No, this was almost 300 years ago.

As the French say, plus ça change et tout ce jazz.

These echoes of the modern day were part of why I wanted to make the leap from contemporary crime fiction into writing historical fiction with An Honourable Thief (Canelo), and setting it in the early 18th century. But I didn’t set out to write a political story. The politics of the day – Whigs and Tories, Jacobites and Hanoverians – obviously played a part, but I wanted to create an old-fashioned, rip-snorting swashbuckling yarn.

As it turned out, that leap wasn’t as big as I first thought because I’d forgotten that I’d been writing historical books for many years.

My earliest books were non-fiction, mostly true crime, and although I was forever urged to include up-to-date cases I was always more interested in historical crimes. Dark Heart (Mainstream), outlined the history of Edinburgh’s Tolbooth – for centuries the town jail – and Glasgow’s Black Heart was a criminal history of the city from 1800 onwards. Then there was Indian Peter (Mainstream), the biography of Peter Williamson, in the mid-18th century abducted as a boy from Aberdeen, sold into indentured servitude, and then experiencing war and loss in the American colonies before returning home to become an author, publisher, publican, and developer of the first penny post in Edinburgh.

Even Frightener, (Mainstream) the investigation of the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Wars and co-authored with Lisa Brownlie, could be seen as historical because it was written almost ten years after the dreadful events.

My first foray into fiction would now be seen as historical, though I didn’t realise it. The Davie McCall series (Luath Press) was set between 1980 and 2000. but frankly, any period I can actually remember is not to my mind history. The Rebecca Connolly books also regularly delve into the past, A Rattle of Bones actually begins in 1752 and, in fact, prompted author Denzil Meyrick to more or less dare me to try my hand at historical fiction.

The story had been in my head for over two decades. On her death in 1714, fears rose that Queen Anne had left some sort of document stating she would prefer the throne to go to her half brother, the Roman Catholic James Edward Stuart, and not the Protestant George of Hanover. If such a document existed then it could threaten the stability of the Union, such as it was.

Even so, it was a daunting prospect. I mean, writing a chapter was one thing, but an entire book set in 1715? What was life like in London and Edinburgh? How did they dress? How did they speak? How can I make outmoded views and attitudes more palatable to modern readers without making a nonsense of the reality?

In the name of the wee man, what was I taking on?

In the end, the first complete draft was written in four months. Believe me, nobody was more surprised than me.

It was largely thanks to my non-fiction work, because I had already carried out much of the research over a period of many years. The Edinburgh sections in particular were drawn from my notes for Dark Heart and Indian Peter.

However, there was by necessity further reading. I already had books in my collection but more material was needed. I scoured online sources, and found some gems that have proved most useful.

That period of British history was fertile ground for all sorts of chicanery going on. I created a shadowy intelligence group called the Company of Rogues, which I posit stemmed from the network set up by the Elizabethan spymaster Lord Walsingham. Jonas Flynt, my flawed protagonist, is like James Bond, Harry Palmer, Philip Marlowe and Shane rolled into one. He is an unwilling agent of a crown he doesn’t respect, manipulated and utilised for political reasons about which he cares little, but he has his own sense of honour and well-hidden soft streak.

As for how characters spoke, I decided to stylise the dialogue. Thanks to documentation we know how people wrote back then, but I believe records of testimonies would have been filtered through the mind of the note taker, so felt free to make my own decisions as to rhythms and patterns of speech.

My breakthrough in that regard was in using Thieves Cant, a slang common among the rogues, beggars, doxies and street hustlers of London. They say it was originally devised from Romani speech and became a secret language of the underworld. Delving into the available dictionaries rooting out words that I thought would add to the atmosphere has been rewarding, not to mention fun. However, I try not to overuse it because explaining the meanings can slow the stories down.

The politicians and nobility speak in a more precise way, the Edinburgh folk a little less structured with a few Scots words and phrases thrown in. I decided not to take the phonetic approach overmuch as it irritates me as a reader.

In the latest novel in the series, A Grave for a Thief, Flynt heads to the north of England and again I’ve stylised, even exaggerated, the speech of the locals to differentiate them from those in the south.

Flynt rubs shoulders with figures such as Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard, Blueskin Blake and Sir Robert Walpole who all lived, breathed and hustled in the early 18th century, but their characterisation is my take on their reality. The third book sees Sir Isaac Newton make an appearance and also a man called John Duck who really was a swordmaster in London at the time.

Historians may frown, but I’m a storyteller. The setting is as true as I need it to be in order to keep readers turning pages. The Mar Rising in 1715, an actual escape from the Tower of London, a winter so bitter that the Thames froze have all been used in the plots.

Aside from the opportunity to create full-blooded adventure thrillers, I enjoy merging fact into my fiction: the sights, the smells, the streets, the people of London and beyond; the inns and taverns I mention did – in the main – exist; London’s Newgate Prison, London Bridge, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, Edinburgh’s High Street, Tolbooth and Grassmarket were all more or less as I describe. The slum land of St Giles to which Flynt is often drawn was indeed called the Rookery, although that term was also used for other notorious hellholes.

I have attempted to make each of the three books so far different, while also maintaining the story arcs that began in the first.

An Honourable Thief mixed crime with adventure and even espionage. A Thief’s Justice was a murder mystery. A Grave for a Thief sees Flynt battling the mysterious Fellowship and his own half-brother. The fourth, on which I am working now, will be a mix of gangland and serial killer.

Historians may frown at my approach but I am a spinner of yarns. After all, the bulk of the word history is made up of story.

A Grave for a Thief by Douglas Skelton is published by Canelo, priced £18.99, hardback, out 8 February