The Devil's Acre (43 page)

Writing this book involved some steep challenges, such as conveying the complex history underpinning the story in an engaging and readable way, and marshalling a large cast of characters that included as many real figures as fictional ones. It was an immersive, all-consuming experience, and certainly not easy – but I think I’d be worried if it had been.

What inspired you to write about Colt?

I first came across references to Colonel Colt’s English factory while I was researching the Crimean War for
The Street Philosopher.
It seemed incongruous that six-shooting Colt revolvers, the quintessential guns of the Wild West, were once manufactured by the thousand in the heart of Dickensian London. I decided to investigate a little further and was soon hooked. There was a mystery here – why had this enterprise, set up at great expense
and with such lofty ambitions, shut its gates after only three full years of operation? What had caused Sam Colt, a man not known for caution or defeatism, to retreat back to the United States? I found hints in the histories I was reading of unorthodox business practices, of calculated risks and barefaced deceptions, and saw the beginnings of a story.

From the start, much of the momentum behind this idea came from the arresting figure of Sam Colt himself. Bluntly spoken, barely literate and possessing a volcanic temper, Colt was an engineering and promotional genius who can be called the world’s first truly international arms dealer, counting a number of governments among his customers. I was struck by his chillingly amoral attitude towards his trade; despite freely using images of slaughter in his advertisements, he maintained that he was merely a salesman providing a product, the application of which was simply not his responsibility. His potential as a character was clear.

I also started to consider the London pistol factory itself, planted by the side of the Thames, producing state-of-the-art weapons only a short distance from one of the worst slums in the city. I imagined it must have attracted all kinds of malign attention; and before long plotlines involving thieves and saboteurs were developing in my mind.

How do you begin to turn a figure from history into a character from fiction?

I tend to start with the words of the historical figures themselves, taken from letters,
lectures or publications, which I find invaluable when trying to create a ‘voice’ for them. I’ll then work my way through any biographies that might have been written and also see if I can locate a photograph or painted portrait. When this information has been gathered, I set about integrating them into the structure of the story and planning their relationships with the other major characters.

With Sam Colt, who has by far the biggest role of any actual person I’ve used in my work, this process was remarkably smooth. Colt’s brash personality emerges sharply from the few histories devoted to him; the letters that survive crackle with impatience and irascibility; a studio photograph taken in 1857 shows a massive bearded man in a fine suit, a ‘Yankee Henry VIII’ radiating aggressive pride. I had a vivid sense very early on of how the novel would follow his adventures through London, and the changing relationship he would have with Edward Lowry, his ambitious, slightly callow (and entirely fictional) English secretary.

For more minor characters, where considerably less historical material is available, creative license has to be relied upon more heavily. Most of the real people who appear in
The Devil’s Acre
left few traces of their lives behind them. The traitorous Colt foreman Gage Stickney is a good example: he now only exists in a couple of brief mentions in factory documents and the minutes of the Select Committee on Small Arms.

The truly famous figures I’ve used posed some different problems. An enormous amount
has been written about someone like Lord Palmerston; the important thing about his appearance in
The Devil’s Acre,
however, is that it is filtered through Colt’s point of view, which gave my research on the then-Home Secretary a distinct slant. I had to get a sense not only of what Palmerston might have been like, but what the Colonel might have made of him – of how the two men might have interacted.

Generally, I’ll try to be as truthful as I can, but in the end the historical figures in my books have been drafted into a work of fiction – they are versions of a person serving a story rather than attempts at definitive portraits. I have also, on occasion, added the odd unverifiable detail to amuse myself and enliven the character. There is no evidence, for instance, to suggest that Sam Colt ever chewed tobacco.

Are you tempted to revisit any of the characters from your two novels?

Yes, most definitely. I like the idea of the books existing in their own universe, and in fact put a passing reference to the Crimean War coverage of the
London Courier
(the newspaper I invented for
The Street Philosopher)
in
The Devil’s Acre.
There is one particular character from the first novel who I suspect might have another tale in him; Sam Colt’s early life, also, is rife with hilarious and horrifying escapades.

Do you have any more historical figures on your hit list for future novels?

I’m currently working on a story that might well involve a couple of Impressionist painters, and some of the more colourful figures from French radical politics of the late 1860s. I also have a long-standing ambition to write something about the magnificently strange artist Augustus John, who scandalised polite society in Edwardian England by living as a polygamous Romany-style gypsy, trailing around the countryside in a painted caravan.

What have you read and loved since the publication of
The Devil’s Acre?

In common with many others I greatly admired Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall;
I felt she reinvigorated a somewhat over-familiar story, making it fresh, compelling and profound. For the past few months I’ve been working my way through Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, partly in preparation for a Paris-set story of my own, and have been captivated by the novels’ unflinching confrontation with the realities and tragedies of mid-nineteenth century life. Also, as a committed
Moby-Dick
fan I was hugely impressed by Philip Hoare’s
Leviathan.

What are you working on at the moment?

As mentioned above, I’m a good way into a story set during the four-month siege of Paris that came at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, when the city was starved, bombarded and brought to the brink of ruin. At its centre is Hannah Pardy, an Englishwoman who comes to Paris on the eve of the siege in search of her twin brother Clement, a painter long resident in the city who has
recently gone missing. Her intention is to collect her brother and escape back to England before the Prussian Army arrives; but when she tracks him down in the drinking dens of Montmartre, her plans undergo an abrupt change…

Matthew Plampin was born in 1975 and grew up in Essex. He read English and History of Art at the University of Birmingham and then completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He now lectures on nineteenth-century art and architecture. Matthew is currently writing his third novel.

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The Street Philosopher