Faber & Faber

Meet four of the new generation of crime writers published by Faber and Faber: R. N. Morris, whose second novel featuring Dostoevsky’s celebrated detective Porfiry Petrovich has just been published in paperback; Andrew Martin, whose steam detective Jim Stringer has now embarked upon his fifth mystery; Jason Goodwin, author of the Edgar Award-winning historical thrillers starring the eunuch sleuth Yashim; and Nicola Upson, whose debut novel features real-life crime writer Josephine Tey in the leading role.

These four writers share something in common - all of their crime novels have a historical setting. And as if the crime writer’s stock in trade of careful plotting and attention to detail were not enough, these authors couldn’t wait to add the extra dimension of setting them in the past. The research is a labour of love for them. ‘It's a really exciting part of the whole process,’ says Nicola Upson, ‘both the plots to date have stemmed from things that really happened.’ Goodwin’s three Turkish thrillers were inspired quite directly from his love of the place: ‘Years ago I made a pilgrimage to Istanbul, a city I knew from the poetry of Yeats and a course in Byzantine history. I wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, to understand who those people were.’

‘I was lucky enough to be able to talk to many of the key people who shaped the West End in the 1930s and 1940s,’ says Upson on the research for An Expert in Murder, ‘people such as Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Harris, one of the design team “Motley”.’

This kind of direct association is obviously not possible for people writing about books set further in the past. Roger Morris’s connection to his subject was rather more remote. ‘I knew very little about Russia when I started writing the first book,’ he says. ‘I read - and re-read - Russian novels of the period, of course: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Shchedrin, together with general history books, and social history books. I play this game of chasing footnotes - if I read something interesting in one book that references another book - I then track down that second book.’

Andrew Martin’s research has taken a similar line: ‘I read novels from that period with plenty of demotic language: Arnold Bennett, say, or H. G. Wells. I look at old maps and old photographs. I might see a man with a good face pictured in an old photograph, and I’ll think: "Right, I’ll HAVE him", and he goes into the story.’

The gaps in the record, though, are the most challenging thing for any writer of historical crime to overcome. ‘History books are very good at omitting the very thing you want to know,’ says Andrew Martin, ‘such as "What did the Edwardians call ash trays?".' And Roger Morris recalls such a difficulty during the writing of his debut crime novel: ‘At one point in the writing of A Vengeful Longing I became very obsessed by the sanitation of St Petersburg at the time. It is relevant to the plot, I think.  If I’d had a time machine, I would have loved to go back to St Petersburg in the 1860s and use the toilet. You don’t get a lot about toilets in Dostoevsky.’

The challenges, however, do not stand in the way of the writers enjoying themselves with the research. ‘It’s a joy, says Nicola Upson. ‘My partner, Mandy, is a BBC arts journalist with a great passion for social history, and we do a lot of the background work for the novels together.’ For her new novel they have been in Cornwall researching the undertaking business. ‘It's been quite detailed, ‘she says, ‘so, if the writing goes badly, I can now make a coffin from scratch.’

But Morris is wary about getting too carried away in the process. ‘It’s easy to get lost in the research, and to use it as a delaying tactic. “I’ll start writing, just as soon as I’ve found out about X …” But the truth is you never find out exactly what you’re looking for, exactly what you need, because the only way to get that is to be living in St Petersburg in the period - because what you’re looking for is what it felt like to be alive then.’ Andrew Martin explains that when writing historical fiction ‘you develop your own version of the period, accumulate a vocabulary and a range of references.’

It’s a huge imaginative leap to create the worlds for these stories and characters to inhabit, and readers and reviewers seem to have been struck by how convincing these writers have been, whether it be recreating Britain in the Edwardian era or the 1930s or visualising 19th-century Istanbul or Russia.