I uncovered terrifying event Edwardian event hardly anyone knows about | UK | News

Each period of British history has its own personality. Romans? They are the makers of our laws and language, as well as almost everything else. Normans? We have William the Conqueror, the Doomsday Book, and the Battle of Hastings. Tudors? Henry VIII finds more wives than Norman Mailer.

As for the Edwardians… hmm, that’s the problem with the Edwardians. They are a snapshot. Ask people to describe what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, “So… Did Queen Victoria die?” they will say. and then “World War I?” and if you’re lucky, “Titanic?” This is a gap of almost 15 years where nothing happened in our public consciousness.

This is a problem I faced when I decided to write my first adult murder mystery. I spent 15 years writing books for children: after a decade and a half spent writing stories about loyal dogs (I Am Rebel) and valiant knights (Little Miracle), I was looking forward to slaughtering someone in graphic detail. If I have some time left, I might try writing a crappy sex scene, too.

All I needed was a hook; Something unique to hang the plot from. I’ve always been interested in unusual, lesser-known moments in history, and I found the perfect example of this in the Halley’s Comet Panic of 1910.

For several months, people believed that Halley’s Comet, as it passed by Earth, would fill the atmosphere with poisonous gases and kill all life on the planet. My wife’s grandfather, who lived in a small farming village on Lesbos, even recalled villagers debating whether they should stand on the nearby hill and hope the poisonous gases settled at ground level. The more I learned about panic, the more incredible it sounded. Riots broke out! Stampedes! People built comet shelters and bought anti-comet umbrellas! They took out comet insurance (not including death from fright)! It was so weird and weird that it felt like you couldn’t make it up; In short, it was perfect.

In my book, I had a foolish Viscount seal his mansion to make it impervious to poisonous gases. To survive the apocalypse, he would lock every door, bolt every window, plug every chimney, confine every member of the house to their own separate room… but when the morning comes, he is the only victim, found in a locked study with his family slaughtered by a crossbow – naturally, no one enters or goes there.

The rest of the book came next: I love unconventional detective duos, so I paired a hapless young housekeeper with a dark past with the Viscount’s fickle old aunt – a secret genius with a foul mouth who’s kept locked away in a corner of the manor house for her own safety (and the safety of everyone else). I had the hook, the mystery, the setting, and the detectives; I would call it Murder at the End of the World. I was finally ready to start!

That’s when I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the Edwardians.

The problem is that they don’t seem to have an identity of their own – a seismic shift that still resonates today: By comparison, the Victorian era has a multitude of personalities, leaps in science and technology, people exploring the world and deciding to steal most of it, stovepipe hats, penny bikes, fun beards… I could go on.

The global success of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey has certainly helped change this somewhat, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, when asked, many people misremember that this first series was set in the Victorian era.

As a result, I approached my research dutifully, with a sense of reluctant boredom; It’s like being forced to learn about Roman aqueducts in school. I wanted to write a fun, exciting murder mystery novel… Was I really going to have to wade through hundreds of pages of bone dry material just to make it happen? “Why didn’t the Comet Halley Panic happen 40 years ago?” I hiss through gritted teeth, “so my detectives can drive steam-powered penny cars to murder scenes or something?”

But what I discovered, and which I suspect may be true for many other people, is that I was hugely wrong about the Edwardian period.

Perhaps the key element at play is the one I touched on earlier: it wasn’t Victorian. Over the course of several decades, Britain experienced an incredible, dazzling boom, expanding its colonies and becoming the most powerful Empire in the world. Everything had now stopped: in the eyes of the nation, Queen Victoria was dead, a golden age had passed, and Britain no longer felt like the powerful power it once had. There was a paranoia that things were getting worse: Somehow, for some reason, we were under threat and no one knew why.

Maybe part of it was because of how much things had changed. There were demands for fundamental improvements in society: greater equality, extension of the right to vote to all men and all women, better distribution among the people of the enormous wealth the country had accumulated in previous decades.

There was a persistent sense of impending war across Europe and a widespread foreign threat of xenophobia. People believed that German spies had infiltrated the country, that Chinese immigrants were stealing our women and addicting our children to opium.

Most importantly, no one seemed to agree on anything. Parliaments were hung, there were bitter divisions on major issues. People saw demands for better social equality and universal suffrage as symptoms of a larger disease: The fabric of society was changing, and so nothing felt right anymore.

Everyone was uncertain, nervous and paranoid. People seemed to know that something terrible was going to happen… and of course it did. The world was hurtling towards war: It was as if everyone could see it coming and had been panicking by then. During the First Balkan War, Winston Churchill described the terror that awaited us if the war in Europe was not prevented: “The only thing history can write about such a catastrophe is, ‘This whole generation of men went mad and tore themselves to pieces.'”

Frankly, the more I read about the Edwardian period, the more it reminded me of the present. As a country, we are obsessed with our past: with an uncertain golden age, with a sense that Britain used to be good but is now terrible and something needs to be done about it.

In fact, no one agrees on what used to be good and what is bad now: arguing with each other, in fact, seems to have become the background noise of the last decade. I’ve never known a time when two people were less likely to agree on something. The news is a steady stream of demands for better human rights, a paranoia that the bonds of society are unraveling, a growing sense of panic that the world is preparing itself for war… No wonder we’re starting to put flags at intersections.

Maybe that’s why writing a murder mystery appealed to me in the first place, and why cozy crimes are experiencing a boom in the publishing industry year after year. The world feels like a pretty scary place right now, and murder mysteries, even dishonest ones, are fun.

Real life is abundant and confusing and often doesn’t make sense. By comparison, murder mysteries are completely self-contained, complex little puzzle boxes that can always be solved, satisfying to read because every possible topic is covered in its pages, nothing is left out. If you read a murder mystery and conclude that the victim was murdered by a complete stranger for absolutely no reason, you would throw him across the room in disgust.

Murder at World’s End doesn’t do that. It has secret passages, locked rooms, family secrets, red herrings and a central couple who start at each other’s throats but end up working perfectly together. They catch the killer and uncover the truth, and then go on to solve a series of other mysteries. And I hope I can also give people some insight into the Edwardian period and why it deserves our attention now more than ever.

But you’ll be so excited when you find out I got rid of the sex scene because it was truly awful.

• Murder at the End of the World (Viking, hardback £16.99) by Ross Montgomery is out on Thursday 30 October.