Jean Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage by a river in Cumbria with a view of the Howgill Fells and a lot of sheep, though it is the streets of London that are mostly in her mind when she is writing about Charles Dickens as a detective.
The idea for Dickens as a private investigator came from re-reading Dickens in 2012 – the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.
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I discovered Dickens’s journalism and was intrigued by his articles in the periodical Household Words in which Dickens records his outings with the police in Victorian London. Dickens was fascinated by police investigations, and by murder. There are plenty of murderers in his novels, and he always had something to say about contemporary murders. Dickens is credited with the creation of the first literary detective, Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House. And, perhaps, the first male/female detective duo. Mrs Bucket is instrumental in catching the murderer. Dickens calls her ‘a lady of natural detective genius.’
The first book in the series, The Murder of Patience Brooke, was inspired by Dickens’s home for fallen women which he set up in 1847 with Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, the banking heiress and philanthropist. I thought what if a murder took place at the home. Surely, Dickens would want to be in on the investigation. But he would need a partner, someone in the police force. Dickens could hardly go about London investigating murder on his own. So Superintendent Jones came in. Alas, I couldn’t invent a female partner for Dickens – there were no women in the police force until the creation of the Women’s Police Service in 1915. And Mrs Dickens was far too busy investigating domestic matters, and looking after their nine children.
And then, in no time at all, there were eleven – eleven investigations for Dickens and Jones in which Dickens proves himself to be a gentleman ‘of natural detective genius.’ Of course, there isn’t much in the way of forensics – no fingerprints yet, no police photography, no telephone, but wounds can be examined by the pathologist, poisons analysed, guns identified, and bullets examined. Dickens and Jones know the streets, the back alleys, the disreputable slums, the hiding places of the habitual criminals, and Dickens knows everybody, or someone who knows someone who knows something. All very useful to Superintendent Jones and Sergeant Rogers, Constables Stemp and Feak, and Scrap, the street boy, all of whom play their part in solving the cases.
Number 11 in the series, The Waxwork Man, was published by Sapere Books on 15th September 2023. It is available to order online.
My latest book, The Inheritors of Moonlyght Tower, is the second in my Gothic Mystery series of family secrets and lies. It is now available to pre-order.