April Taylor: British Crime Writer: August 2023

Wednesday 30 August 2023

How did a writer of historical crime fantasy come to write a non-fiction book on Crime and Punishment in Tudor England?

About 15 years ago, I was on a cruise ship going around the Caribbean islands for a month. It was not a pleasure cruise; I was responsible for forming and teaching the passengers who had joined the cruise choir. Some of them hadn’t sung since they were at school, but they had to learn enough music to sing two concerts given in front of all the other passengers. It was fun.

But as I stared out at the port of Antigua, singing was the last thing on my mind. A phrase—Henry’s black-eyed boy—kept running through my head. I wanted to write a book about what might have happened had Anne Boleyn given Henry VIII the strong, healthy, male heir he so desperately wanted. Which meant, of course, changing history.

Well, that was a problem, because pedantic is my middle name and I didn’t want to change the history. So how could I change the history but only tweak it a bit? I couldn’t, so, in the end, I decided to not only change history but play into the beliefs and fears of magic and witchcraft so prevalent in the Middle Ages. The Tudor Enigma, featuring my apothecary at Hampton Court Palace was born, and the books were accepted and published by Harlequin.

Fast forward 8 years, and suddenly, an email from Pen and Sword Publishing popped into my inbox. The editor loved The Tudor Enigma books and how did I feel about writing a proper non-fiction book on crime and punishment in Tudor England?

How did I feel? Panicked, yes; enormously complimented, yes; terrified, yes. I said yes. Two years later, Crime and Punishment in Tudor England: From Alchemists to Zealots has just hit the bookshops. I won’t lie, it was sometimes a soul-searing experience. The depth of man’s inhumanity to man, not just in how the punishments were allocated, but how some were refined to extend the victims’ agony, led me to some very dark places.

Crime and Punishment in Tudor England: from Alchemy to Zealots, is not written for an academic audience, but for the Everyman reader. In other words, for those people who know a bit, or even, perhaps, very little about ordinary life in Tudor England and would like to know more; but in an accessible way and with some low-key humour thrown in.

The book begins with a review of how things were before that momentous day on 22nd August 1485 when Richard III was killed on Bosworth battlefield. Richard had worn his crown into battle but lost it while he was being hacked to death. It was found in a nearby bush, and Henry Tudor’s supporters lost no time in placing it on his head.

The book reviews the law as it developed from Roman law through the Vikings and King Alfred. The latter spent time in Rome soaking up the legal system and was familiar with it. He brought some of its tenets into English law when he became king. And, of course, it is to Roman law that we owe many of our current legal Latin terms.

The book then reviews the state of policing—dire, unpaid, and dangerous, prisons, equally appalling, and the effect of population movement on law & order in Tudor England. How agricultural and other rural practices affected the movement of people from the country to the towns in an effort to find work. This, of course, had an ongoing effect on vagrancy and begging. And, of course, beggars, as they are sometimes perceived in the 21st-century, were viewed with hostility, suspicion, and violence.

I have to warn you there is a gory section, which details the punishments and exactly what happens to the body when those punishments are inflicted upon it. If you want to know what happens when you are decapitated, burned, boiled or hanged, this section is for you.

The foregoing sets the scene for Case Studies, where you will find the weird and the wonderful, and the far from wonderful. You will meet arch con-man Gregory Wisdom and find out that stupidity is not a 21^st century attribute, nor limited to the poor; John Daniell, who tried to blackmail the puissant Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I; why many women accused of witchcraft confessed to things nobody today would believe; where Charles Dickens found his ideas for Oliver Twist; the different levels of treason, and many more.

"Crime and Punishment in Tudor England: From Alchemists to Zealots".

Here is the link:
https://t.co/LuiSW5trex

Wednesday 23 August 2023

Workers’ playtime ain’t what it used to be: The work/life balance

Reams have been written about the work-life balance. How vital it is for our wellbeing and mental health to make sure that life is not all about work. That we remain human beings and not human doings.

So one wonders why some countries – and although I am highlighting the USA here, I know other countries are just the same - still have a mindset that if workers take the holiday they are due, they are somehow slackers, not committed to their job; that if they are not on call 24/7, they are not pulling their weight; that they must never go anywhere without their phone in their hand. They are conditioned to be driven, otherwise they are sub-standard. In the USA, some people have been fired for taking time off because they are ill. If you’re not here, I will find someone who can be. The people who inhabit the land of the free have so little holiday time they have to fit a lifetime of experiences into two weeks or fewer. That’s relaxing…not. This is a lifestyle being promulgated by industry slowly but surely.

That leads on to what these driven people do in the few hours they are not at their desk. Do they sit back, kick off the shoes and look at the ocean? Seemingly not. Millions of them have a work hard, play hard mindset; they conquer the world at their desk and then go and kill somebody on the squash court. I cannot help but think this will end up with their brains like engines on maximum revs 24/7, leading to breakdowns and burnouts.

It is well documented and has been for years that people need downtime from work in order to make their work life mindset function at a higher level. All work and no play doesn’t just make Jack a dull boy, it makes him a sick boy. Here are a few studies you might find interesting:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-012-9345-3

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6617405/

https://hbr.org/2004/10/presenteeism-at-work-but-out-of-it

Writers are no different. We, too, need a work/life balance, but even those of us who are lucky enough not to need a day job and who work from home, don’t always find it easy to live a balanced life. Because if we are not writing, we are usually working out plot twists or what happens next, or what aspect of research we are going to tackle tomorrow.

I have, in the past, managed to work out the details of a complicated plot twist whilst cross-stitching an entire row of stitches in the wrong colour. More than once. If I am walking the dog, I am likely to be dictating the next bit of the story or muttering bits of dialogue to myself. Or, when accompanied by my (human) dog-walking companion, explaining abstruse bits of history to her, or talking through why my main character has to do what he/she is about to do. Why on earth she would be interested in me pondering the reason William of Ypres retreated at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, with his contingent of troops, in the least bit interesting is debatable. (Especially when contemporary chroniclers accused him of cowardice in leaving King Stephen to be captured by the Empress Matilda’s forces. My opinion is that he obeyed the instructions of Sun Tsu in The Art of War, and there is every reason to think that William, educated as he was, and experienced, hardened battle commander as he was, had read Sun Tsu’s advice.) See, I’m at it again!

What I am trying to say is that, we writers need to leave the words behind for a few hours every day and concentrate on something completely different that requires total concentration, in order to be fresh enough to come back to the words the next day with renewed enthusiasm. By which I mean something complicated but different. For me that is dressmaking, painting, and singing. You can’t sing properly if half your brain is thinking about your latest magnum opus, and you certainly can’t sew properly if you aren’t concentrating on putting on that facing so it fits perfectly. If you don’t, you are likely to sew it on the wrong side of the garment; (been there, done that).

I am learning – slowly – that my relaxation is just as important as my work time. That if I am not at my desk all the time, that is good. And that if I don’t take the downtime, the writing I do produce will be not my best work.