Anna Sayburn Lane

Thriller author

Anna Sayburn Lane

November newsletter: News on my next book, spies in Canterbury and Christmas books

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Work in progress

I’ve been plotting out the next Helen Oddfellow mystery – and it’s time to start writing. I’m taking part in NaNoWriMo, the mad month where writers try to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. The idea is to push myself to get a first draft down on paper. Follow me on Twitter @BloomsburyBlue to see how I get on!

Murder, mystery and spies

I had fun guiding 30 enthusiastic visitors around the beautiful city of Canterbury on my Marlowe, Murder and Mystery tour in October. We visited places connected with the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who inspired my novels Unlawful Things and The Crimson Thread. The city centre is full of Elizabethan-era buildings, and we started at the church where Marlowe was baptised in 1564 (number 10, St George’s, on the map below). We also visited the building where Queen Elizabeth I stayed, before Marlowe joined Her Majesty’s Secret Service…

Would you like to join me next time? I know not everyone can get to Canterbury, so I’m offering a free online tour, on Tuesday November 15 at 20:00 GMT. Please register so I know how many to expect.

Registration here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/christopher-marlowes-canterbury-online-tour-tickets-457056206417

1560 map of Canterbury
A 1560 map of Canterbury

My walk was part of the excellent Canterbury Festival, which brings together musicians, artists, performers and writers for two weeks of arts events. I enjoyed an entertaining talk on women and espionage, by the spy writer Nigel West. Did you know that the Canterbury playwright Aphra Behn, one of the first women playwrights, was a spy for King Charles II, back in the seventeenth century? There must be something about Canterbury writers that makes them into good spies!

Recommendations: what I’m enjoying now

I heard crime writer Dorothy Koomson talk at the Fatal Shore crime writing festival recently and couldn’t resist her latest novel My Other Husband. It’s tense, twisty and tremendous fun. The heroine is a successful crime writer, author of The Baking Detective series. When people around her start dying in ways that resemble the crimes in her books, she thinks she knows who it is – but how can she clear her name?

I’ve been diving into some old movies recently. I enjoyed the wit and style of the 1960s spy thriller The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine and based on the Len Deighton book. It’s very much of its time, but just the thing for a dark autumnal evening.

Offer: Christmas book bundles

What could be more Christmassy than a set of signed books by your favourite author? I’ll be signing and sending out a limited number of book bundles in December. If you’d like to buy one, two, three or all four books, signed with a dedication of your choice, drop me an email on hello@annasayburnlane.com and let me know which books you’d like. First come will be first served. The cost will be £9 per book plus postage. Sorry, but because of postage costs this offer is UK-only.

Have a great November, and happy reading!

Signing books at my local bookshop

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Photo of Anna signing books in the Deal BookshopAfter more than two years of online events, it was lovely to be invited to sign copies of my books at the Deal Bookshop in my home town of Deal, Kent. I had fun chatting to friends and customers who dropped by to pick up a copy of Folly Ditch, my latest Helen Oddfellow mystery thriller. It’s a friendly place and quite the social hub on a Saturday afternoon! Thanks to David for inviting me, and to all the staff for their help.

Who was Nancy?

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Fagin, Sikes and Nancy, by James Mahoney

Charles Dickens told his biographer that Nancy in Oliver Twist was based on a real woman. But who was she?

The character is a ‘fallen woman’, part of Fagin’s gang and the lover of the burglar Bill Sikes. When we first meet her, she and her friend Bet are described as ‘not exactly pretty, perhaps, but they had a good deal of colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and hearty. Being remarkably free and agreeable in their manners, Oliver thought them very nice girls.’

Dickens doesn’t tell us exactly what Nancy does, but the description hints at prostitution. She has no police record, however, and is able to go to the magistrate court unrecognised to see Oliver’s trial for pickpocketing. It’s Nancy who comes up with a plan to kidnap Oliver off the streets. But she has a change of heart, protects the boy from Bill when he threatens to beat him, and eventually goes to Oliver’s benefactor to warn him of danger to the boy.

Although she is offered a chance to ‘go straight’ she prefers to go back to the only life she knows, out of loyalty to her friends. That fatal act, however, is seen as a betrayal that Bill Sikes cannot forgive.

A few years ago, another author found a report of a murder case where a woman was killed in circumstances similar to Nancy, shortly before Dickens wrote Nancy’s death. But Dickens did not know the murdered woman, although he probably heard about her death and may have used it while writing Oliver Twist. So who was Nancy?

We don’t know, and we probably never will. But that little mystery was enough to spark my imagination – and get me started on the novel that became Folly Ditch.

I made a little video of some of the ways in which Nancy has been depicted – view it here.

Charles Dickens, villains and the criminal underworld

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Engraving of thick-set man with top hat and stick, accompanied by dog.
Bill Sikes and Bullseye, by Fred Barnard.

Charles Dickens started his career as a newspaper reporter, and wrote about social issues throughout his life. That’s one of the things that attracted me to his novels – and inspired my new novel, Folly Ditch.

The world of Oliver Twist, with criminal gangs, children in danger and vicious thugs exploiting the most vulnerable, may seem like a long-gone historical era. But when I thought about some of the stories in the news now, I began to see parallels. Fagin and Bill Sikes would fit right in with today’s people traffickers, gang-masters and county lines drugs operators.

I wanted to explore those parallels, to look at how the criminal underworld that Dickens wrote about lies just below the surface of today’s Britain. The result is Folly Ditch, in which Helen Oddfellow’s investigations into a brutal Dickensian-era murder lead her to some very twenty-first century criminals.

A ‘good villain’ is essential for a decent thriller or crime novel, and Dickens created some of the best. He began his career writing for newspapers, where he no doubt heard about plenty of thugs, conmen, swindlers and murderers. My own experience as a newspaper reporter certainly helped when it came to creating some villains of my own. And when I began writing Folly Ditch, I found myself drawn back to a character from my first novel, described by one reader as ‘terrifyingly convincing’.

The key to creating a good villain, as a writing tutor once told me, is to remember that every villain thinks they’re the hero. Something that Dickens, I’m sure, kept in mind when writing his swaggering, thuggish burglar, Bill Sikes.