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Page Updated: 13/06/05

		Barbara Nadel, creator of the highly successful crime series featuring Turkish Inspector Cetin Ikmen talks to Tangled Web about the influences on her new novel Last Rights
	Last Rights 13 June 05
	Petrified

First Edition Headline (2005)

Fiction is so much more comfortable than reality. Having said that, I never have and never will trivialise the subject of death in any of my books. The fictional characters in my Turkish Çetin Ikmen series suffer terribly from the grief and loss that from time to time affect their lives. But when grief comes to you, the real flesh and blood person embedded as we all are in mundane reality, it’s like being slashed open with a machete and left to bleed onto the ground. The shock is almost mortal. In 1999 I lost my best old school friend to a kind of vicious and fast growing cancer that feeds specifically on the young. I was devastated - or rather I thought that I was until my father died, again very suddenly, just two years later. Only then did I really know what complete devastation was. I entered that dark zone of constant mourning that those who have lost a person very close to them will recognise all too easily.
I would like to say that continuing to work through this period kept me sane, but I know that isn’t true. What it did do however, was allow me to explore my feelings about death and, at the same time, look back with fresh eyes at my father’s life and the times in which he lived.
In 2003 I wrote the sixth book in the Ikmen series, Petrified. Quite unconsciously at the time I decided that in this book I would, amongst other things, look at the differences that exist between British/European death rituals and beliefs and those that apply in Turkey. I wandered into the arena of comparative religion, which was fascinating and also easy for me to access. However when it came to the more practical aspects of death I did need some help. Petrified amongst other things, includes details about the embalming process, its application and results. And so in order to further this research I consulted a professional embalmer who was, as well as being a very kind and humane person, also extremely charming and humorous. In addition to acquiring the information I needed for Petrified I also started to think about the qualities people in the undertaking profession might need in order to best help those they set out to serve. I came to the conclusion that this profession must test those involved in it to their emotional and sometimes physical limits also.
All the time I was doing background work on Petrified I was, of course, thinking about my father too. My dad was an east ender and grew up during the blitz. He used to tell many stories about that time - some funny, some frightening, some just plain bizarre. What went on in public and private air raid shelters was a popular topic, with accounts of enormous neighbour women getting stuck in doorways and wild sexual abandon happening on the platforms of underground stations across the capital. But one story he particularly liked concerned his own father who was a World War I veteran. Although it was never actually said, my grandfather probably lost his mind in the mud of Flanders. He had, I know, seen men and horses drown in shell holes the size of cathedrals - he used occasionally to rave about it when I was a child. It was probably his experiences in the Great War that precluded my grandfather from entering any air raid shelters in World War 2. Sometimes when a raid was on he would just stay in his bed in the family flat. Other times he would go out walking at almost a running pace, pounding the streets as if enacting a sort of punishment upon them. Whether he would not shelter because he was afraid of being buried alive under his home or whether he had just simply lost faith in any sort of protection, I don’t know. But that he was alone, often sick and perpetually haunted has always troubled me.
One story about him that was kind of nice however was the one about how he, on one of his crazy walks out one bomb filled night rescued the local undertakers horses. Terrified of the conflagration all around them the poor beasts had kicked their stable door down and galloped off into the night. The undertaker, who didn’t have anything but a horse drawn hearse at that time was beside himself. My grandfather was an excellent horseman and via a combination of what we would now call ‘whispering’ and a firm and confident hand, he caught and returned the horses to the undertaker. The latter, it was said, in return promised my grandfather a slap up funeral when the time eventually came!
I don’t know the exact moment when all of these elements came together to form the character and world of Francis Hancock, the undertaker ‘hero’ of Last Rights. Even before my father died I had known I wanted to write some sort of crime story set in the east end of London. Dad’s death and the memories it evoked simply brought that 1940’s era and the image of my damaged World War I veteran grandfather to the fore. And so I pitched an outline to my publisher, Headline, and they made the decision to back me. After seven years of writing nothing but Çetin Ikmen mysteries now I was writing something else in addition to my ‘usual’ output and it was exciting, challenging and scary!
So who is Francis Hancock and how is the tone of Last Rights different from all my other books? Well first of all, unlike the Ikmen books, we the readers see the world through Francis’s eyes. I imagined the narrative in the first person, it seemed very natural, and so that is how the book is written. I had a lot of help both inside and beyond my family with the language and tenor of the 1940’s which can, especially with a London setting, come across as rather ‘corblimey’. But I think and hope that I have avoided the worst excesses of this type!
Although rooted in the east end and its traditions, Francis Hancock is, in many ways, an outsider. For a start his mother, Mary, is an Indian originally from Calcutta. Francis’s father, like a lot of men of his generation, served as a soldier of the British raj in India where he met and later married Mary. So Francis is dark and those who don’t know him frequently think that he is one of the many eastern European Jews resident in the east end in those days. What however really marks Francis out from his peers is his own personal past. The Great War as World War 1 used to be called, left countless men scarred in both mind and body. Francis, like so many young men in 1914 joined up with a great group of ‘pals’ eager to serve king and country and hold back the awful forces of the ‘Hun’. Only he and one other made it back home. His friend, Ken White, is horribly scarred and cannot work because of his physical wounds. Francis on the other hand, is scarred inside. His mind is damaged and, although he can and does work very hard, his relationship to his profession is obsessive as is his belief that only the dead can ever be truly innocent. Although not a religious man, Francis in a way sanctifies the dead that he serves. Not all corpses were recovered during the blitz and many of those that were, frequently had their fresh graves desecrated by Nazi bombs or incendiaries. A walk through an east end graveyard in late 1940 could be a most grisly and disturbing affair.
The plot of Last Rights - that I am most certainly NOT about to reveal here - is concerned less with the war and more with some of the ills and inequalities, particularly with regard to women, that afflicted British society at that time. Francis comes from a family of women - he lives with his mother and two sisters and, although unmarried, he does have a girlfriend. Like a lot of middle aged men who worked in reserved occupations at that time, the other males he comes into contact with are generally either very old, very young or sick. And so to some extent, Francis comes to see the world from a feminine point of view. It is precisely because he can do this that he becomes involved in the events that make up the story of Last Rights.
Writing this book has been a fascinating and very emotional journey for me. It has not always been enjoyable although I must say that all of those people I have consulted along the way have been without exception, charming, informative and full of enthusiasm. In addition ‘working with’ Francis Hancock has been a joy. Strange, tormented and yet funny and oddly attractive too, Francis is, I hope, a fresh and relevant voice from the carnage of World War I. A pacifist in a time of war, his observations are, I believe, as relevant today as they were in 1940. The only sane response to war is the one that so many ‘madmen’ have espoused over the centuries - to condemn it utterly and without reservation.

Barbara Nadel

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