Cora Harrison
How I Came To Write The London Murder Mysteries
 

When I was a child I was always ill – in fact from the ages of seven to fifteen I hardly attended school at all. Most of my time was spent in bed – either at home or in hospital.
     And these were the days when there was no television.
     So I read and read and read. When I ran out of children’s books I started on the set of Charles Dickens that my family possessed. I still remember these books, bound in red leather with gold edges to the pages. By the time I was ten years old I had read all fifteen or so of them. And then I reread them – and I still do.
     Oliver Twist was my favourite when I was young. I wasn’t too keen on Oliver himself – a bit too goody-good for my taste, but I loved Fagin’s gang, especially the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates; I liked their jokes and the way they got such fun out of their life, which was

   

dangerous. I even liked the way they cooked sausages over the fire in the miserable tumbledown house that they inhabited.So long before I ever came to write ‘The London Murder Mysteries’ I had a clear picture in my mind from books such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, of how Victorian London looked and even smelt!
     But the idea itself came from something that I read about a real family living in London at that time – about 150 years ago. The four boys were left without parents or shelter or food so the eldest boy, who was a good singer, trained the others and took them out singing everyday in Oxford Street, among the well-off shoppers, and managed to get enough money to pay for rent and food.
     There was only one sentence about these boys in a book that I read about London in the time of Queen Victoria,

 
   
but it was enough to set my imagination working. I wondered how these boys managed. What would happen if no one gave them money? What would it be like to be out in the streets of London in the rain and snow and frost and above all, the fog? Dickens writes a lot about the fog that lingered sometimes for months– fog was immeasurably worse than nowadays because of the coal fires that burned in every house and shop in London at that time.
     And so I thought of a gang of street children, living off their wits…
     Alfie was the first character that I invented – I imagined him cheeky and daring, and very keen on being clever. Then came Sammy. I made him blind because so many of the children of the poor in those days were blind – mainly from measles.

Then I added the two cousins, Jack and Tom and made them quite different. Jack is easy-going and agreeable; Tom is a bit spoilt and bit inclined to be sulky. He and Alfie are both strong characters so they clash on numerous occasions.
     And then came the fifth member of the gang and this is Mutsy. I am a great dog lover and seldom write a book without a dog in it, but I think Mutsy must be my favourite out of all the dogs that I created. I can imagine him soclearly – a big, hairy, affectionate dog – a bit like those dogs in the ads for Dulux paints. When my children were young we had a lovely (and huge) dog, called Rolfe, and he was taught to do all sorts of clever tricks just like the gang teach Mutsy.
     They make a great gang and I really enjoy planning their adventures.

Cora Harrison