Lyn Squire was born in Cardiff, South Wales. During a twenty-five-year career at the World Bank, he published over thirty articles and several books within his area of expertise, and was lead author for World Development Report, 1990, which introduced the metric – a dollar a day – that is still used to measure poverty worldwide. Lyn was also the founding president of the Global Development Network, an organization dedicated to supporting promising scholars from the developing world. He now devotes his time to writing. His debut novel, Immortalised to Death, published by Level Best Books in September 2023, introduced Dunston Burnett, a non-conventional amateur detective. It was a First Place Category Winner in the Mystery and Mayhem Division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards. Dunston’s adventures continue in Fatally Inferior and The Séance of Murder, the second and third books in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy. Lyn lives in Virginia with his wife and two dogs.
Dunston Burnett, a Victorian-era middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, is not cut out to be a detective, yet circumstances invariably conspire to place him at the center of singularly complex mysteries. In Fatally Inferior he must contend with the abduction of a member of Charles Darwin’s family, the missing person inexplicably spirited out of a locked-tight country house. A few days later, a ransom demand arrives at Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent, threatening that the hostage will be killed unless Darwin renounces his theory of evolution in The Times. Meanwhile, a former maid at Down House dies, or so it seems, giving birth in London’s Shoreditch workhouse. Believing her dead, her baby son is swiftly dispatched to a hell-hole orphanage in Hampshire. These apparently independent events converge in a vile act of vengeance: a hellish torture for the victim; the perfect revenge for the perpetrator. Will Dunston ever be able to expose the heart of this dark, confounding mystery?
Lyn Squire stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:
Researching the second book in a mystery series
Is researching the second book in a mystery series easier than researching the first? To answer this question, I draw on my experience with Fatally Inferior, the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy. My answer is mixed. In some areas, the second book requires less work; in others it can be more challenging and more demanding.
My first book, Immortalised to Death, is set in late nineteenth-century England. For this book, I researched Victorian dress, furniture, architecture, vernacular, patterns of everyday behavior and so on, to provide period-authentic material for scene-setting and character portrayal. This task is relatively straightforward, since information on most aspects of Victorian life is readily available on the internet. Nonetheless, the effort takes time that would otherwise be available for writing. My second book, Fatally Inferior, is also set in the Victorian era. Much of the background research for book one was, therefore, of immediate use for book two, a huge labor-saving help.
Another way in which a prior book can significantly reduce the research required for the current book is through characters that appear throughout the series. For example, Dunston Burnett, my protagonist, is the glue that binds the three-book series together. A diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper (think of a latter-day Mr Pickwick), he is not cut out to be a detective yet circumstances invariably conspire to place him at the center of singularly complex mysteries. He is fully described when he first enters the story in Immortalised to Death so his presence in book two did not entail the need for additional research. While the character evolves throughout the series, the associated extra research was minimal.
A second book, however, invariably introduces new locations and characters which naturally require fresh research. For example, Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent, is not mentioned in the first book, but it is the venue for several scenes in Fatally Inferior, and its layout is crucial to the execution of the crime at the center of the book’s plot. Down House is open to visitors. The ground floor is set out as in Darwin’s time with the great man’s study furnished exactly as it was when he was writing The Origin of Species. Given the house’s key role in my story and the likelihood that many readers would be well acquainted with the house, I decided I had to visit it myself to make sure that my description stayed true to the original.
This may sound like an unusually burdensome research demand. But the house is only an hour and a half’s journey from Central London, and many authors visit more distant locations that figure prominently in their books. Moreover, I had undertaken a similar research excursion for my first book. Book two’s new location did entail extra research, but, I judged, no more than I had expended on book one for the same purpose. The same point holds for new secondary characters like Charles Darwin himself. Additional research is called for, but, again, no more than I devoted to the same task for book one.
Conjuring up a storyline for my second book, however, proved a much more challenging task than for the first. The kernel of the idea for the storyline in Immortalised to Death, my first novel, was crystalized in my mind before I began researching the book in any detail. This, I suspect, is the case for most authors embarking on their first book. As a result, research for that book was focused and limited. It is the exact opposite for the second book.
Immersed in drafting the first, I had not allocated time to conceptualizing what I would write about in the second, so that when I wrapped up book-one, there was nothing on hand for book-two. Instead of having a sparkling gem ready to propel the new novel, my literary cupboard was bare, and I found myself casting about from scratch for a fresh idea that would prove a worthy follow-up. This, I imagine, happens to many other authors writing a mystery series.
To find the right storyline for book-two, I expanded my research about events and people in the time and place where I set my stories (Victorian England), hoping that something would spark my imagination. And eventually something did. I was reading Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin (Voyaging and The Power of Place, Princeton University Press, 1995 and 2002 respectively) when two aspects of his life jumped out at me. I had found an intriguing pair of leads for a new story.
One arose from the uproar that greeted the publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. Darwin was immediately bombarded with scathing reviews in academic journals, blistering editorials in the leading newspapers and crude cartoons in the cheaper broadsheets. This avalanche of disgust and hatred from believers in God’s creation of man, led me to imagine a more malicious assault on the scientist. Was this an idea I could use in my new novel? Indeed, it was. I explored several possibilities, finally settling on the abduction of a Darwin family member and a threat that the kidnap-victim would die unless Darwin retracted his theory in a letter to The Times.
The other had to do with the blood relationship between Darwin and his wife, Emma. They were first cousins; they had a common grandfather in the person of Josiah Wedgewood. In the nineteenth century, the offspring of marriages between such close relatives were thought to suffer loss of vigor and infertility. This fear weighed heavily on both husband and wife, and brought to mind an image of a couple desperate for a grandchild only to be cruelly robbed of any hope of a happy old age spent in the blissful company of their children’s children by a vile act of revenge. I was soon picturing a scene in which Emma Darwin is forced to witness the horrific death of the couple’s only grandchild.
Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but the furor created by his theory of evolution and the consequences of his marriage to his first cousin, motivate and structure my entire story. After much effort, considerably more than I expended on the first book, I had the pegs on which to hang my story.
Looking back on my experience with the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy and the amount of research that was required compared with the first book, the key take-away is this: The overall quantity of research and background reading may not change that much but its distribution across activities changes significantly. In my, probably typical, case, the focus of research shifted dramatically from scene-setting and character portrayal, all adequately covered in writing the first book, to the new and challenging task of conceiving a fresh idea for the second book’s storyline and developing it into a full-blown successor novel.
You can learn more about Lyn Squire and his writing by visiting his website and by following him on Facebook and Goodreads. Fatally Inferior is now available via Level Best Books and can be found in all major booksellers.
