Research for my latest thriller, Language of Angels, led me to a very special place – the Old Library at st John’s College, Cambridge, built in the 1620s. Out of bounds for most readers, I was lucky enough to be granted a private tour of this extraordinary room.
On arrival, I was ushered by the rare books librarian along a passage between the shelves of the more commonly used New Library. Up a spiral staircase and then, suddenly – like travelling through some strange time warp – I was transported into another epoch. Standing there at the top of the stairs, I was immediately overwhelmed by the solitude of the long room with a central aisle. The stained-glass windows and high, vaulted ceiling gave the place a sacred aura, more cathedral-like than any library I had ever been in. All the shelves and the leatherbound volumes had been browned by centuries of time. A medieval library, seemingly untouched; the musty smell of another era filled my nostrils.
There was one book, in particular, written half a millennia ago, that I knew was there. A previous owner had been a shadowy, sixteenth-century figure called John Dee.
A true polymath, Dee was a mathematician, astrologer, philosopher and magician, to name but a few of his disciplines. He was also a courtier to Elizabeth I. This man, who died penniless, once owned a home at Mortlake, which housed the largest private library in Elizabethan England. He was also a high-ranking spy for his queen.
To this day, myths swirl around this enigmatic character. Some contend that he was responsible for the victory over the Spanish Armada, assisting the navy with his meteorological predictions. There is also a delightful theory, somewhat discredited now, that he signed his letters to Elizabeth as ‘007’, thus giving the author Ian Fleming the idea for Bond.
Dee had been a student at St John’s in 1542. I tried to imagine him as a fifteen-year-old, studying by candlelight in the very room I was in. It felt like I was peeking through a window to another time. What is it about history that inspires so many crime writers? Is it the ancient manuscripts, artefacts and long forgotten people? There is something almost mystical about delving into our past: ghosts, out of reach, but connected by evidential fragments. And when the past and present collide, it can make for a gripping story.
Next, I was picturing one of the characters from my unfinished novel. Hadi, a scruffy, teenage misfit on his own quest for truth, hiding from the police in one of the alcoves. That novel, Language of Angels, is set in contemporary Cambridge but delves into the mysteries of our shared antiquity that shape us today and offers a portent for where we are going.
I took a seat at the reading desk, snake weights at the ready, eagerly awaiting the librarian with the tome I had come for.
At last, he approached and handed it to me with the care of a surgeon. A beautiful slab, the size of an atlas and pleasingly weighty, with an aged, orange-brown cover, it was a handsome book indeed.
My heart skipped a beat as I saw it, scrawled across the text-block. Written in John Dee’s own hand, in bold, black ink – his name – proof of a fleeting ownership four hundred years ago, yet still echoing through the ages.
But why had I come to see this book?
You will have to read Language of Angels to find out.
Language of Angels is published by Hobeck, 20 August 2026.
