Stepping Back Into The Past With Susan Grossey

Discover Two Wonderful Mystery Series...

The Constable Sam Plank Series

About the Sam Plank Books

Fatal Forgery

by Susan Grossey

first in the 'SamPlank' series

Historical crime

It is 1824, and trust in the virtual money of the day – new paper financial instruments – is so fragile that anyone forging them is sent to the scaffold. So why would one of London’s most respected bankers start forging his clients’ signatures? Sent to arrest Henry Fauntleroy, Constable Samuel Plank is determined to find out why the banker has risked his reputation, his banking house and his neck – and why he is so determined to plead guilty.

As the case makes its way through the Regency justice system, exercising the finest legal minds of their generation and dividing London society into the banker’s supporters and detractors, Plank races against time to find the answers that can save Fauntleroy’s life.

Fatal Forgery is the first in a series of seven Sam Plank Mysteries – if you like your Regency reading with some shadow and reality, join Constable Sam Plank on his patrols today.

Universal Buy link:

https://mybook.to/FatalForgery

Susan writes:

I think it is important to know, and admit to, your own strengths and weaknesses.  For instance, I do not have a great imagination, but I am very good at dogged research.  This meant that when I decided to turn my hand to fiction (after decades of writing technical non-fiction), I felt most comfortable basing my story on reality.  I think of it as having a skeleton of facts on which I can hang my fiction.  Not for me a fantasy world – I have always found our own world too fascinating to spend time in another.

And so my first historical crime novel – Fatal Forgery – is based on the true story of a London banker who, in 1824 and for seemingly no good reason, stole all the money from the bank owned by his family.  The case was well-documented in the press of the time, and the trial was widely reported.  But luckily for me there were enough gaps in the story – primarily, why did he do it? – for me to explore various options and come up with a plausible explanation.

As I was writing the story, I quickly realised that the banker would not be the only real person in the book.  There would be the magistrate who first heard his case, the judges who sat on his trial, the prison keeper who held him in remand, and so on – all real people.  And there were varying levels of detail available about them.  One of the three judges had had a portrait done, for instance, while the prison keeper was the subject of a few newspaper articles because he was unusually kind and had only one leg!  I soon established the standard with which I was morally and professionally happy: if something is known about someone, I cannot change it, but if it is not known, I can speculate as long as it fits with what is known.  So it was known that the magistrate was a widower but not whether he remarried, so I kept him single.  The narrator of the book, a magistrates’ constable called Sam Plank is a fictional character, although aspects of him are based on reality: there were magistrates’ constables in London at the time – and I pinched his solid, dependable, oh-so-English name from the transcript of a trial at the Old Bailey.

Subsequent books in the Sam Plank series were slightly different, in that I did not focus them on a central well-known case.  But for each of them my starting point was a trawl through the newspapers of the year, to look for interesting crimes and historical details that would give flavour to the story – such as unseasonal weather, or fascinating inventions, or what we would now call celebrities.  And writing in the real world was not without cost.  When I reached the seventh book in the series, set in 1829, both Sam and I had to call it a day: the Metropolitan Police came into being, and magistrates’ constables were out of work.

About the Author

I have been in love with words ever since I realised, at age three, that those squiggles on the page actually meant something.  For twenty-five years I ran my own anti-money laundering consultancy, which gave me almost limitless opportunity to write about my very favourite subject: financial crime.  And when I decided to turn my hand to fiction, I realised that it had been going on for centuries.

I have spent years haunting the streets of late Regency London, in the company of magistrates' constable Sam Plank. He is the narrator of my series of seven historical financial crime novels set in consecutive years in the 1820s – just before Victoria came to the throne, and in the policing period after the Bow Street Runners and before the Metropolitan Police. I have now started a new five-book series, the Cambridge Hardiman Mysteries, again set in the 1820s and narrated by a university constable called Gregory Hardiman; the first in the series, Ostler, has been published and I am currently writing the second.

 https://susangrossey.com/

https://regencyinsider.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-regency-insider

https://www.facebook.com/SusanGrosseyAuthor/

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The Cambridge Hardiman Mysteries

About the Books

Ostler by Susan Grossey

Historical Crime/Mystery series  book 1

Cambridge of the 1820s is not all lectures and prayers, as university constable Gregory Hardiman discovers in the pages of this intriguing Regency crime novel.

After the horrors of war against the forces of Napoleon and the hardships of guarding convicts in Australia, ex-soldier Gregory Hardiman is enjoying the quiet life of an ostler at a Cambridge coaching inn, with only the occasional nightmare to disturb his sleep, and memory of lost loves to disturb his waking hours. But when the inn’s cook is found drowned in the river in the spring of 1825 and his distraught widow pleads for help, Gregory finds himself caught up in the unexpectedly murky world of college life in the town.

As fine wines and precious artworks disappear from St Clement’s College, he navigates uneasily between the public world of the coaching inn and the hidden life behind the high walls of the college. And when a new law requires the university to create a cadre of constables, will Gregory take on the challenge?

Ostler is the first in a planned series of five Cambridge Hardiman Mysteries.

https://mybook.to/Ostler

The Sam Plank Mysteries are set in London in the 1820s, narrated by magistrates’ constable Sam Plank.  When I finished that series and wanted to write some books set in my hometown of Cambridge, I decided that I would stick with the same decade, to make life easier.

Reader, how wrong could I be?

What I had neglected to realise was that the 1820s in London – the most important city in the world at the time, home to some of the greatest people and innovations of the age – was vastly different to the 1820s in Cambridge.  Back then, Cambridge was a small, smelly, backwater of a town – mostly swamp, with a few insular colleges providing religious education. It was cold, dark, windy and rather miserable – a world away from the bright lights of London (street lighting arrived in London in 1807, but not in Cambridge until 1823).

I had also overlooked the fact that my huge reservoir of information about the 1820s – and particularly, crime and justice and policing in that decade – was concerned with the world of the general public.  I knew very little about the history of the University of Cambridge at that time, and I knew my main character would have to navigate both worlds. So it was back to the drawing board, and the archives, and the newspapers, and the art galleries – to learn about all aspects of Cambridge in the 1820s.  And with the added pressure of knowing that modern-day Cambridge is stuffed with highly-qualified historians who can spot an inaccuracy from a hundred yards (yards was indeed the measure in the 1820s – even butter was sold by the yard in Cambridge).

But just in case you feel too sorry for me, I can assure you that I love this research, and am already thinking about where I might go after the five Cambridge-set books; King’s Lynn is looking tempting….

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