Thriller author
I had a great time recording an audio-tour, Dead Men in Deptford, to celebrate Deptford Literature Festival in March 2022. The tour takes in local literary types from Christopher Marlowe to Charles Dickens, diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Joseph Conrad and Anthony Burgess.
The tour is still online, so you can listen in, download the map and transcript, and visit yourself – or just listen in and imagine the scenery!
A theatrical curse. A shocking discovery in the cathedral. Only one woman can unravel the mystery and prevent more bloodshed.
When Helen Oddfellow goes to Canterbury for the opening of a Christopher Marlowe play unseen for 400 years, she is expecting an exciting night. But the performance is disrupted by protests, then a gruesome discovery in the cathedral crypt draws her into a desperate hunt for a murderer.
Is the play cursed? The actors think so, but Helen doesn’t believe in curses. As friends go missing and Helen herself is threatened, she pursues the clues through the ornate tombs of the cathedral and the alleyways of the ancient city. Mysteries from the distant and not-so-distant past are exposed. Can Helen find the killer – before he kills again?
The third Helen Oddfellow mystery is coming soon.
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Publishing Spring 2021.
Are you looking for a perfect present to introduce someone to the Helen Oddfellow mysteries this Christmas?
I’m offering two-book bundles, each including a signed copy of Unlawful Things and The Peacock Room, gift-wrapped and sent to the address of your choice, for £15 (including posting and packing). UK postage only.
I only have a few of these available, so if you’d like to order one, email me today at hello@annasayburnlane.com.
I enjoyed a long chat with Rachel New, outreach officer for Lewisham Libraries, for their Lewisham Voices website, about the inspiration behind Unlawful Things and my next novel, The Peacock Room. In
cludes tips on writing in lockdown, becoming a journalist, and how not to give up on your novel during eight years of writing!
You can listen to our conversation here.
In the week that Unlawful Things is finally published, I made a little pilgrimage back to the church yard where it all began. St Nicholas Church in Deptford, tucked away in Deptford Green, is a tranquil corner these days.
But in May 1593, it witnessed the burial of the mercurial, astonishing playwright Christopher Marlowe, dead at the age of 29. As his friend, the printer Edward Blount, wrote to his patron, Thomas Walsingham, it was there that “we brought his breathless body to the earth.”
Marlowe’s death – he was stabbed after a dinner in a house in nearby Deptford Strand – was the starting point when I began to think about the plot that became Unlawful Things. The novel’s opening scene takes place in contemporary London, with another man stabbed in the church yard where Marlowe is buried. Although I used to live nearby, it had been many years since I visited.
It was a glorious, sunny day, the sun filtering through the plane trees and making the famous gate post skulls look almost cheerful. I was surprised and touched to see a little leather-bound notebook propped up on the plaque which commemorates Marlowe. Inside, people from all over the world had left messages for him, about how much his work meant to them. I couldn’t resist adding a few lines, signed by my novel’s protagonist, Helen Oddfellow. Take a look if you ever go there; you might like to see what she said.
Unlawful Things will be published today. I have a long list of “thank you’s” to everyone who has helped me get to this point. But I shouldn’t forget to thank Christopher Marlowe, whose eternal plays and poetry set me on this path.
Finding the right title for my novel was a real challenge. I’d written at least three drafts before I managed to alight on a title I was comfortable with.
For a time it was going to be The Marlowe Connection, until someone pointed out that could be mistaken for a book about railway travel in Buckinghamshire. For a while I considered Cut is the Branch, a line from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. But then… might someone think it was a gardening manual about pruning trees? Or that we were back to railways again, with a critique of cuts to rail services?
But Marlowe did supply the title I finally alighted on, Unlawful Things. The full quote, from the epilogue to Doctor Faustus, has the chorus moralising on Faustus, whose pact with Mephistopheles results in him being dragged away by demons to hell:
“Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.”
In other words, profit from Faustus’ example and stay well away from the ‘unlawful’ necromancy he used to pry into secrets that should only be known by ‘heavenly power’.
I liked the title because one of the themes of the book is the price we risk paying when we try to uncover secrets. And Unlawful Things has an unsettling, mysterious ring to it, which is always an asset in a mystery novel.
As a journalist, prying into unlawful things is pretty much in my job description, so I don’t have much sympathy for the idea that we should all just mind our own business. Humanity has risked much and gained much from the pursuit of its curiosity, down the ages. But there can be a high price to pay, whether it’s Marie Curie succumbing to cancer after discovering radium, or contemporary journalists murdered in the pursuit of corruption and organised crime. One of the questions I wanted to explore was, how high a price should we be prepared to pay?
Unlawful Things will be available to buy on Amazon next week, at a very reasonable price. I do hope you’ll take the opportunity to discover it for yourself.