It is my great pleasure to introduce Martin (M.J.) Lee as my guest author today. Martin is the author of the Inspector Danilov novels and the recently published City Of Shadows is the second book in the series. Martin is also the author of the recently released Samuel Pepys and the Stolen Diary. Martin has spent most of his adult life writing in one form or another and here he talks about how his love of history and travel merged one evening during a stroll in Shanghai, sparking the idea for the Inspector Danilov novels.
Thanks, Eva for this opportunity to talk about myself and the Danilov novels. It’s something I love doing almost as much as I love writing the books.
The other passion was crime novels. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and Ed McBain all graced my sticky little fingers. I still have many of the copies of the books with their wonderfully lurid covers at home.
Well, a few years have passed since then. I did a degree and postgraduate degree in history, but never became a criminal, having no opportunity to put into practise the methods of murder so beautifully described by Ms Christie. I spent most of my working life in advertising (it was the only place that would pay me to have ideas), taking a couple of sabbaticals to write. I still have the rotten evidence of those sabbatical years on my computer – three books that have no hope of ever getting published.
A couple of years ago I became a freelance Creative Director, writing novels in the mornings and doing my freelance work in the afternoons.
Finally, I had achieved the sort of balance I wanted in my life ( a book in each hand). I remember very clearly when the idea for writing a novel set in the Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s came to me.
The Inspector Danilov books were born. And what a time to write about. Back then; the city of ‘joy, gin and jazz’ was an amazing melting pot of adventurers, spies, triads, opium smugglers, merchants, con-men, communists, criminals, fascists, Japanese militarists, gamblers and refugees. With such a witches cauldron of deceit and double-dealing, happiness and despair, wealth and poverty, it soon became obvious that only a crime novel, with its strong moral compass, could explore the depths of the abyss that was Shanghai.
At last, my two passions, history and crime, can now both co-exist together. So far, two books in the series have been published, Death in Shanghai and City of Shadows, with a third on the way in October. Given the wonderful cesspit of characters who lived in the original ‘Pearl of the Orient,’ there’s no shortage of wonderful material for the future.