EVEN GREATER LONDON, 1887: a vast, uninterrupted urban plane encompassing the entire lower half of England and, for complex reasons, only the upper third of the Isle of Wight… The immense Tower casts electricity across the sky itself, powering the mind-boggling mechanisms of the city below; the notorious engineer-army swarms through its very veins, building, demolishing, and rebuilding whatever they see fit; and – at the heart of it all – sits the country’s first ever private detective agency.
Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle hoped things would pick up quickly for their new enterprise. No one is taking them seriously, but their break will come soon. Definitely… Probably.
Meanwhile, police are baffled by a series of impossible bank robberies, their resources wholly absorbed by the case. Which means that when a woman witnesses a kidnapping, Fleet-Entwhistle Private Investigations is the only place she can turn for help. Luckily they’re more than happy to oblige.
But what’s the motive behind the kidnap? As Clara and Fleet investigate, they find more than they could ever have imagined…
1. Don’t wait for permission
My debut novel (co-written with my husband Chris) wouldn’t exist if we had gone about things in the traditional way, that is to say, if we had waited for someone to give us permission to write the thing we wanted to write.
Chris and I have spent a long time writing comedy together, and spent many years performing with our comedy troupe at fringe festivals around the UK in the hope that we would be “discovered” by one of the gatekeepers who could give us permission to write something for a wider audience. This didn’t happen, and eventually we got fed up with waiting and decided we’d find a way to reach that wider audience ourselves. This led to us creating the audio-drama podcast Victoriocity: a neo-Victorian detective comedy. This decision was one of the best we ever made, because after the show’s second season we were contacted by our publisher (Gollancz) who encouraged us to write a novel set in the same world. That novel is High Vaultage,but it’s a standalone story that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of the series.
What we learned was this: don’t wait for permission from the gatekeepers. We spent so many years waiting for someone to invite us to write for radio or TV, following the usual advice of touring live shows and submitting (unsuccessfully) to the very limited and hugely competitive open-door initiatives run by traditional broadcasters. Victoriocity was a way to showcase our writing and build an audience without having to wait for a commission, and it led to opportunities including the book contract and – funnily enough – writing for a traditional broadcaster (in our case the BBC). That’s not to say writing an audio drama is the right route for everyone, more that it is worth considering alternative routes to achieve your writing goals.
2. A good editor is worth their weight in gold
Chris and I were extremely lucky to be paired with the supremely talented editor Claire Ormsby-Potter at Gollancz. One of the biggest challenges of writing is not always being able to see where the cracks are. You can have such a clear idea of what your story is and where it is going, that you can miss different – often better – opportunities for story direction and development. This is where a good editor can help transform your book into something much stronger than your initial draft, something we definitely learned whilst editing High Vaultage with Claire (who would never let us get away with using clichés like ‘worth their weight in gold’).
Our novel is essentially a cozy crime mystery set in an alternate Victorian London. In one chapter, Chris decided that a fun location to visit would be one of the many building sites run by the in-world engineer-army of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In the first draft this was simply a colorful backdrop against which one of our detective protagonists could learn some information that would propel the plot forward. This led to our favorite editorial note to date: ‘you’ve accidentally invented a doomsday weapon as a casual aside, perhaps we should… do something about that?’
3. We remain as preoccupied as the Victorians with trying to make sense out of chaos
Floating over London in a hot air balloon in 1862, Henry Mayhew reflected on the ‘special delight’ the mind experiences when it is able to ‘comprehend all the minute particulars of a subject under one associate whole’ (‘A Balloon View of London’). Invoking the metaphor of London as a ‘monster’, Mayhew casts the city as a frightening, unfamiliar thing of chaos. Yet the piece as a whole works to subdue this threat, to tame this monster by demystifying it through the demonstration that, given the right vantage point, it is capable of being viewed and understood as ‘one associate whole’. As Mayhew observes the vast cityscape from the air, he renders the ‘Great Metropolis’ comprehensible ‘at one single glance’, creating from the ‘previous confusion of the diverse details’ a ‘form and order of a perspicuous unity.’ Mayhew achieves this feat through the clever use of metaphors that describe the ‘strange conglomeration’ of the London landscape in terms both familiar and domestic: meadows become ‘table covers’ and steam trains ‘ordinary tea-kettles.’
Mayhew’s desire to make the world around us familiar and unimposing, to make it comprehensible and communicable in everyday terms, has always reminded me of the Victorian novelist’s desire to create the sense that human mastery over the world is possible (see further: Peter Brooks’ The Realist Vision, Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel, Raymond Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence). I think a large part of what lay behind that impulse to render the world knowable and communicable in meaningful ways was the sense, or fear, that the world might just be chaotic and meaningless. There are a multitude of reasons why people felt this way, not least the huge technological and scientific advancements that completely transformed the way people thought about, for example, time and space (the coming of train travel, the invention of the telegraph) or even their own existence (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theories of evolution).
High Vaultage is set in Victorian London, albeit a reimagined one, and during the writing process I think we learned that part of the appeal of writing about Victorian England is that we are still troubled by the same worry that everything, in the end, might just meaningless chaos, especially as we are ourselves experiencing our own age of techno-bafflement. In many ways I think High Vaultage and the chaos of its world is a working out of our own feelings and fears about the tumult of our own lives. But we hope – like any good mystery story or Victorian novel – the resolution of High Vaultage brings the comfort that there is meaning behind everything after all, even if that meaning is to be found in the relationships, and in particular friendship, with those around us.
4. Out-imagining the Victorians is really hard
The setting of our novel is Even Greater London: a nineteenth-century megalopolis which covers the entire lower half of England. The idea for a London that never stopped expanding came from Chris, and was inspired by Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower. Tesla’s tower – a project that began on the eastern seaboard of the US and was eventually abandoned – was a very early experiment with wireless power transmission. The tower was intended for communications, but Tesla’s experiments also reveal that he believed it was possible to beam electrical power wirelessly through the atmosphere. In Even Greater London, this wireless transmission of energy has been achieved, resulting in a supercharged industrial (and electrical) revolution. This setup was intended as a way for us to pose the questions: what if the Victorians, but uninhibited by the limits of their technological progress of the time? What if the Victorians, but more bonkers? What if the Victorians, but more bizarre? What we learned was that this imaginative exercise is reallyhard because not only are you contending with the gigantic minds of geniuses like Nikola Tesla, you’re also competing with people who already dreamed up some pretty bonkers inventions.
A perusal of various Victorian periodicals reveal countless advertisements and designs for electric corsets, oscillating bathtubs, tent-coats, drawbridge pavements to deter burglars, a transparent spherical velocipede (which looked like some sort of early zorb ball prototype), and street lighting suspended from hot air balloons which doubled as viewing platforms with telegraphs in order to create a panoptic network across the city in a sort of terrifying early imagining of CCTV. I even once read about a piano oven that was designed to bake the perfect meringues while you delighted guests with, presumably, whatever musical piece paired best with a pavlova.
5. Always say what happened to the dog
When we had what we felt was a good draft of High Vaultage, we sent it out to a few beta readers to get some much-needed feedback. When that feedback came in, there were a number of things that a few of the readers had picked up on or agreed about – aspects of the novel that needed to be improved or better drawn, for example. But there was no one thing that everyone unanimously agreed on. With one exception: the dog. At the start of the novel our detective protagonists have just set up Even Greater London’s first detective agency, and it’s not going well. To indicate this we introduced the idea that the only active case they had was a lost dog, a case which they had taken to appease their landlady and owner of the downstairs coffee shop and to whom they owed rent. In the draft sent to beta readers, the mention of the poor lost beagle was merely meant as chapter one scene and scenario setting, as a way to indicate to the reader that business wasn’t exactly booming for our detective duo. But it turns out there is no such thing as an incidental dog: the readers demanded to know what became of the missing hound. And who are we to argue?
Jen Sugden is one of the co-creators of the audio drama podcast Victoriocity, a comic sci-fi detective thriller set in a reimagined Victorian past. She holds a PhD in Victorian Literature from Royal Holloway, University of London where her research focussed on nineteenth-century sensation and detective fiction. Alongside her studies, Jen began writing and performing comedy with her now husband and co-writer Chris Sugden, who she met whilst an undergraduate at Oxford University. After a number of years performing live improvised and scripted comedy together, the pair moved into writing audio drama and were part of the writing team behind the BBC Sounds weird fiction anthology series Murmurs.
Originally from Doncaster, Jen now lives in Oxford with Chris, their son, and two intermittently obedient cairn terriers.
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