THE FIRST FIVE PAGES: KJ Maitland

Writing historical crime thrillers often feels like one of those crazy circus acts where you have to stand on the backs of two galloping horses, with one foot on each, trying to keep your balance. One of the horses is the historical facts, the other is your invented plot and characters. And there’s the constant danger of the story falling flat on its face between them, so it’s vital to hold those horses close together from the very beginning. When I was writing my new novel, The Drowned City, getting those first five pages just right seemed more important than usual, because they are not just the beginning of this book, but the first five pages of a whole new series.

1 History had handed me a big dramatic event, but my hero had missed it.

On a calm January morning in 1607, a year after the executions of Guy Fawkes and other gunpowder plotters, a tsunami or giant wave swept up the is told by a conjuror, Daniel Pursglove, who, when the wave strikes, is languishing miles away in London’s Newgate prison, fearing he is about to get his hands chopped off. It is only because of the disaster that he is sent off to Bristol. So, he can’t witness the tsunami at first hand. I could have had another character describe what happened to Daniel, but the drama of the scene would have been lost. The solution was to write a prologue, using an all-knowing narrator, allowing the reader see the moment the wave strikes.