How it all started

I have been repeatedly asked how I came to write the Rompchester novels. The true answer, as with so many things in life, is somewhat involved. It all starts on a day when I and my god-child sat on the back seat of her parent’s car. We were all tired after a long day in the Austrian mountains. I also remember a long traffic jam. We were all a bit grumpy. So I started to think about a story I could tell to my god-child to cheer her up. I first thought of Tom. Tom Gunby, also called Tommy Gun. But to be quite truthful I didn’t get much further than that, because I was tired, too. So I could not cheer up my god-child, at least not with a story about Tom Gunby.

But I kept thinking about the story, though, and it started to develop. Initially, I imagined a big and eerie house, two gangsters, and  mysterious man from the land-of-stories. Rompchester came next. I have always had a liking for Oxford (and Cambridge, but a bit less so), and I am a fan of British crime fiction. So the choice of an English university town was an easy one. And then came the owl. And then came Lily. In fact, she stormed into the picture just as I describe it in “The Case of the Murdered Don”.

But after a while I got stuck. You see, I wasn’t actually trying to write a crime story. I had hoped to write some sort of fantasy story. Nothing with witchcraft or unicorns or magic wands. They are not my cup of tea. But still something very fantastic. I still remember that there was to be a fugitive Celtic King who would team up with Tom and Lily, and robber-knights, and soldiers in trenches of the Great War.

Only: I never was able to complete that story. In fact, I never got over the first few chapters. Despair!

What does one do in a such a situation? Abandon the whole plan? Throw it all into the bin? I thought about it but couldn’t quite do it. Tom and Lily and Rompchester and the owl and Walton College – I couldn’t just leave it all. After a while it dawned upon me that I had been very stupid. It lay all right in front of me: All I had to do was to write a classic crime story with Tom and Lily as detectives, and everything would fall into place. It took me a few weeks to work out the first plot. And a couple of months to write it. But once I had got going it seemed to be so easy because it all seemed to be so natural.

That is how it started. Let’s see where it takes me. Or you as reader.