Please welcome John Bainbridge, who along with his wife, Anne, write the Gaslight Crime blog, and who will explain to readers but what IS a Penny Dreadful, a delightfully creepy topic for Hallowe'en!

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Writing a Penny Dreadful
Past John Bainbridge

A couple of years ago I wrote the first adventure of a Victorian vigilante called William Quest, a gentleman adventurer with a swordstick who seeks to right wrongs and even upward the injustices of society. That volume was called The Shadow of William Quest.

At present I've written a sequel called Deadly Quest .
The whole projection arose from my interest in the Victorian underworld. I've always wanted to write a novel that is office detective story, part thriller, and which hearkens back to the traditions of the Victorian Penny Dreadful tales and the Newgate Novels.

Many a Victorian author wrote these popular tales, which were the staple fiction diet of the newly-literate classes in 19th century England. I've read a lot of them over the years. The best ones are fast-moving, oft sinister and take lots of activity. They are occasionally subversive, pricking at the mores of the mean solar day with often undiluted social criticisms.

Most of the writers are forgotten these days, but some went on to groovy heights. Fifty-fifty Charles Dickens used elements of the Newgate novel in Oliver Twist.

My starting time novel was set up in London and Norfolk. The new book, Deadly Quest, is prepare entirely in London, generally down by the River Thames. I've tried to capture a real feeling of London in 1854.

Fortunately, I've spent years studying Victorian history – I did it as a minor subject area in my university degree. I've devoted a lot of time since to an expanded report of the Victorian underworld, particularly as regards London.

I've walked the streets and alleys used by my characters, by day and dark. London has changed a neat bargain in 160 years, of course. Much of the Victorian cityscape has been bombed or swept away by developers. The London that is in my imagination is more real to me at present than the modern metropolis. In that location are traces of Quest's London nonetheless to exist seen, merely they get fewer year by twelvemonth . . .

Mortiferous Quest has scenes in a notorious rookery of the fourth dimension called Jacob's Island. A district of bloodcurdling poverty in Victorian times, Charles Dickens visited it with a police guard. It features in the climax of Oliver Twist.

Information technology was already partially demolished by the 1850s. The area was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the London Blitz, and redevelopment accounted for much of the residual. Today that once dreadful slum is a evolution of luxury flats. You tin still visit Jacob's Island, only it takes quite a leap of imagination to get dorsum to Victorian times.

One problem I encountered in my sequel was that I revealed virtually the whole of Mr Quest'south back story in the first novel, explaining why he decided to accept the law into his own hands, fighting for truth and justice and then on. In the new book nosotros start with a completely clean slate.

It's my intention to practise a whole serial of William Quest novels, though the original conception of a Victorian avenger has changed since the first book. The outsider now finds himself working on both sides of the law.

This wasn't unusual in Penny Dreadful novels of the Victorian Age, where the author frequently establish his or her villain transformed into the hero.

With the creation of e-book readers, nosotros are finding ourselves in a very like situation to those Victorian readers. A whole new audience has appeared, eager for books. It seems to me that we should study the methods of the writers of Penny Dreadfuls and Lurid Fiction to cater for this expanding market place.

They found a popularity afterwards all, and created their own genres.

Mortiferous Quest can be found at:
https://world wide web.amazon.co.uk/Mortiferous-William-Victorian-Mystery-Thriller-ebook/dp/B01LYGNCNQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1474537824&sr=1-1&keywords=mortiferous+quest