Paul Burke: Welcome to Crime Time Luke and congratulations on the publication of Bad Blood, how are you enjoying people reading your debut?
Luke Deckard: Thank you, Paul! I have nervously loved sharing Bad Blood with readers. It’s been a long time in the making, so it’s a relief to have it out. There was a time I didn’t think it would come out at all. I’m also glad to see readers are responding kindly to the novel.
PB: So please tell us about your new historical crime thriller, Bad Blood? Nice to see a post-WWI novel, they’re not so common.
LD: Bad Blood is set in 1922 and follows Logan Bishop, an American P.I. in London, looking for a missing woman who is connected to his father’s murder. It’s a fun, noir romp. It’s very much written for people who love reading Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley and Philip Kerr. And you’re absolutely right; we don’t see many post-WW1 noir novels. In the last few years a number of cozy 20s novels have sprung up and there are plenty of late 1930s crime novels and a gluttony of 1940s/WWII ones. But when I sat down to write the story there weren’t many 20s set crime novels! Which surprised me. But in many ways, TV was ahead of the curve there. Shows like Peaky Blinders were set in the 20s. Even comic book movies like Wonder Woman were set in WWI, but crime fiction lagged behind. That was part of my attraction when I set out to write it. I knew there were plenty of WWII crime novels, and I wanted to do something different. I have always loved the Jazz Age: Art Deco, flappers, jazz music, and disillusionment. My favourite novel is The Great Gatsby, which captures everything beautiful and tragic about the time so wonderfully. So, to write a novel set around that time and play with that historical setting was really exciting! I wanted to explore a slice of history that we just weren’t seeing much of in the ways of crime fiction.
PB: You mentioned a long time in the making, give us a feel for the gestation of the novel.
LD: Years in the making, indeed. I first had the idea for a 20s thriller in about 2013 and I finished Bad Blood properly in 2023 when I completed my PhD. So I’ve been working on this idea and character for about ten years, which is crazy. After sitting with the idea for a few years, when I began my MA in creative writing at Kingston University in 2016, I decided to play with the idea seriously. I ended up writing a prototype novel that year, and in 2017, when I began my PhD, I honed the concept. Aspects I kept from the prototype were the 1920s setting, the American ex-pat P.I. in London, aspects of the voice, and the location of his office. Of course, the story and character went through all sorts of changes and rebirths, as well as more name changes than I can remember. But during the writing process, in 2020, I submitted the novel to Bloody Scotland’s Pitch Perfect contest, which I got accepted into but sadly didn’t win. And in 2021, Bad Blood, under the title ‘Wasteland’, was also shortlisted for the Amazon New Voices Awards at Capital Crime. So it was great to see some early responses to the novel and that readers had an appetite for it! It just took time finding a publisher!
PB: I enjoyed the atmosphere of the novel, London and the smog (amazing how bad that was), then Edinburgh, a place you clearly love. Did you enjoy creating that feel of the two cities a century ago?
LD: The smog! Yes, there was so much smog! Winters were nuts in the 1920s. I remember having to explain this during my PhD to a lecturer who thought I was getting things confused with the Great Smog of London in 1952. I had to remind them that pea-soupers have choked London since the Victorian era. I had a blast recreating historical London and Edinburgh. I love both cities; they are two of my favourite places on Earth. I spent a lot of time reading about both places, looking at pictures and maps, and, of course, visiting locations. I used every chance I had to go to Edinburgh and walk around and soak up the city. So much of it is unchanged that it was easy (much easier than London) to see the story as I walked the streets. And really, I wanted to make London and Edinburgh feel as authentic as I could. I hope I accomplished that!
PB: Tell us about your protagonist, Logan Bishop, he had a bad war, maybe we’d recognise him as suffering from PTSD these days, is that how you see him? Of course, he also cares about people and that’s why he can’t refuse the case, even though he’s reluctant.
LD: Yes, Logan absolutely suffers from PTSD. That was something I was keen to explore. Typically, in ‘tough-guy’ fiction, we don’t really see the effect of war. You don’t see it much in Spade, Marlowe, Hammer et al. There’s plenty of cynicism, disillusionment, and awareness of the wars and its impact, but we rarely see how the wars impacted these PIs mentally; we don’t see them struggle with PTSD. There might be inferences, but it doesn’t play a role in the story. We do see this kind of trope in early Hemingway novels like Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. So, I drew a lot of inspiration from those in addition to researching the various ways PTSD affected men at the time. I read a lot of heartbreaking first-hand accounts from soldiers and doctors. The estimated number of men suffering from PTSD in the UK after WWI was in the 100,000s, with most going undiagnosed and finding ways to cope. In Logan’s case, he takes comfort in morphine. In many ways, Logan is a sad, lost man at the start of this novel, trying to make sense of a violent world. More violent and ruthless than he’d ever known. He’s somewhat hopeless but hopelessly trying to do the right thing, which I found took him on an interesting character journey.
PB: You love noir and hardboiled fiction/film, was it natural going for that American voice? The outsider always makes for an interesting narrator but he’s also a P.I., again I suppose that’s Hammett and Chandler.
LD: The American voice was something that came up in my MA, actually. It’s funny, I’m American, but most people don’t know that until they hear me speak. Then everything changes. During my MA, I found some people were unable to marry me being American and writing a British protagonist, I said, eff it, he’ll be American. Chandler was, of course, a literary hero, just as Hammett was. But they weren’t the ones I looked to the most. One author was James Crumley. His P.I., Milo, carries intense war-trauma from his time in Vietnam. I also had Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald in my mind more than the giants of hard-boiled fiction. Mainly because I was thinking about and reading authors of the 20s, particularly Americans who lived in Europe or wrote about Americans in Europe. On another level, writing hard-boiled fiction came much more naturally to me than writing Golden Age British-style crime fiction. Of course, I read Doyle/Christie/Sayers et al., but the clockwork mechanisms of their crimes never resonated with me, but the hard-boiled/noir style always has. I always gravitated towards the loner-hero in fiction, whether that was in films and tv or books. So writing hard-boiled was a no-brainer. But writing an American protagonist took some time to think about.
PB: Your research must have covered a lot of ground, politics, location, post-war society, gangsters, tell us about that, how does it fit with the real history, is it important to be accurate, even though it’s a novel?
LD: I think accuracy is important, but there’s always room to wiggle. You’re not going to have a mobile phone in 1922, but you might have a food brand or a medical procedure introduced a few years earlier for the sake of the story. When writing Bad Blood, I tried to be pretty accurate. What I was most interested in was having something to say or show about history. I feel like when one is writing about a historical period, there should be a reason for it. Philip Kerr wanted to see what Philip Marlowe would be like in Nazi Germany, for example. With Bad Blood, many of the themes could have easily been modified and explored in a modern context, but not everything. When I was researching the 20s, I was quite taken with what was happening with Lithuanian immigrants in Britain. Huge numbers had fled Lithuania for Britain and America to escape Russification. Many worked in factories and mines. So, Edinburgh was one of the most highly populated areas for Lithuanians. When the First World War broke out, many were given the option to fight with Russia or Britain, and most of those who fought with Russia weren’t allowed back into the country. The reason (or weak excuse) was that the British Government couldn’t be certain these men hadn’t become communists. This meant thousands of Lithuanian families (mothers and children) couldn’t see their fathers/husbands, which meant families went without the main breadwinner. Where Bad Blood picks up, the British Government are in the process of repatriating many families. It was a very traumatic time for them and heartbreaking. That was something I wanted Logan to encounter. It was something I felt important to include and shed light on. And using a two-sided city like Edinburgh, you have old vs new, immigrant vs citizen, fathers vs sons. So I tried to incorporate a nice amount of historical reality, but elsewhere I played with things. The coal mine in the story doesn’t exist, for example, but then the nightclub Logan visits did! So, I think with historical fiction, there’s bound to be a lot of fictional elements and some bending of history to fit a story, but never to a breaking point. Otherwise, you’re writing speculative fiction.
PB: That Lithuanian story adds a dimension to our understanding of the time, it’s something I was only very vaguely aware of. Was there an origin point for the story, a particular spark that got you interested in the first place? Or character?
LD: I think the original spark in 1913 came from watching Peaky Blinders. I loved the violent, gritty tone. It’s very American, very Godfather-like. I was also re-reading The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett at the time. And I kept thinking, I want to write a gritty P.I. in European landscape!
PB: Peaky Blinders was so entertaining, I can see how it inspired you and Hammett is endlessly fascinating. So this is to be the first in a series featuring Logan. How’s the next novel coming, anything you can tell us about the story?
LD: It’s coming. I’ve got some ideas, I’m working them out and… yeah, it’s coming. What I can say for certain is that Logan 2 will be a London-based story. I am keen to do gritty London, having gotten Edinburgh out of my system… for now!
PB: Of course, you’re no stranger to podcasting but you’ve just started a new one with Matthew Booth. Tell us about Mean Streets please.
LD: Mean Streets is a podcast dedicated to all things film noir. But we don’t limit ourselves to films from the 40s-50s. We cover Neo-noir and even TV shows like Sugar on Apple+. The show is a celebration of noir and our love for it. We are nearly 20 episodes in and having an absolute blast. We’re also really grateful to have had such a wonderful response from listeners. People seem to enjoy our ramblings, which is great. We’ve also managed to have some great guests, including Ian Rankin, who joined us to chat about Chinatown and the new Rebus series.
PB: Give us a couple of film recommendations, maybe a must see for a newcomer to noir?
LD: Oh, Out of the Past, The Big Heat, Chinatown, and Blade Runner. Each is perfect in its own way and would be a wonderful gateway for someone interested in film noir.
PB: Who’s your favourite P.I.?
LD: Spenser, by Robert B Parker. I love those novels, I love Parker’s work. He did a fantastic job blending the cynical loner P.I. attitudes with understanding the value of friendship and a dedicated love interest. Politically, I find Spenser to be one of the most interesting PIs in literature. Spenser is always clashing with various political ideologies, head butting with right and left leanings, and he wrestles with the ideas through the novels in ways I don’t see as many P.I. or cop-led fiction do, where the moral certainly is black and white.
PB: Spenser, yes, certainly one of my favourites. Thanks Luke.
Bad Blood is available as ebook and paperback from Sharpe Books
Bad Blood Luke Deckard – (amazon.co.uk)
