Q&A with Lyn Squire

 

 

 

Lyn Squire is the author of the new novel Fatally Inferior, the second in his Dunston Burnett trilogy. He worked at the World Bank for 25 years, and he lives in Virginia.

 

Q: Fatally Inferior is the second in your Dunston Burnett trilogy--did you know from the start that you’d be writing a trilogy?

 

A: I did not. In fact, it was pure chance that took me into writing in the first place. 

 

I have always been an avid reader, and a few years ago, I decided to reread some of the classics I had read in my youth. One of the books happened to be The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. A solution to his unfinished novel sprang into my mind out of the blue, and my writing career was launched. 

 

It was during the drafting of my first novel, Immortalised to Death, that the writing bug bit me, and it was at that point that I started planning the Dunston Burnett Trilogy. 

 

Q: What inspired the plot of Fatally Inferior?

 

A: Believe it or not, I found the storyline for Fatally Inferior in a biography of Charles Darwin. When The Origin of Species was published on Nov. 24, 1859, Darwin was bombarded with scathing reviews, blistering editorials and crude cartoons. 

 

This avalanche of disgust and hatred from believers in God’s creation of man led me to imagine a more malicious assault on the scientist. This became one subplot for Fatally Inferior. 

 

I saw a second in the blood relationship between Darwin and his wife, Emma. They were first cousins. In the 19th century, the offspring of such marriages were thought to suffer infertility.

 

This brought to mind an image of a couple desperate for a grandchild only to be cruelly robbed of any hope of a happy old age spent in the blissful company of their children’s children. 

 

Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but the furor created by his theory of evolution and the consequences of his marriage to his first cousin drive and frame my story.

Q: Did you need to do any research to write the book, and if so, what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: The big surprise was that the second book in the Dunston Burnett Trilogy entailed considerably more research than I had anticipated.    

 

For my first book, Immortalised to Death, I researched Victorian dress, furniture, architecture, vernacular, patterns of everyday behavior and so on, to provide period-authentic material for scene-setting and character portrayal. 

 

My second book, Fatally Inferior, is also set in the Victorian era so much of the background research was in hand.

 

Similarly, my protagonist, Dunston Burnett, a diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, is fully described in Immortalised to Death so his presence in book two did not entail the need for additional research. 

 

Nor did the theme for the trilogy – the tension between Dunston’s limitations as a detective and the apparently unsolvable mysteries confronting him.  

 

So what generated the need for extra research? A second book invariably introduces new locations and characters which naturally require fresh research. 

 

For example, Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent, is the venue for several scenes in Fatally Inferior, and its layout is crucial to the execution of the crime at the center of the book’s plot. 

 

Given the house’s key role in my story, I decided to visit it myself to make sure that my description stayed true to the original. (Down House is open to visitors.) 

 

The same point holds for new secondary characters like Charles Darwin himself. Additional research is called for, but this is not what made the second book so research-intensive. It was the storyline.

 

I had the background material, I had the protagonist, and I had the theme. I did not have the storyline. For this, I turned to bibliographic research and read as much as I could about personalities and events in Victorian England in the hope that something would pop up. 

 

Many books later, I had become a minor expert on such hot 19th-century topics as the Corn Laws, the Crimean War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Great Exhibition, but none yielded that storyline I was seeking. 

 

None, that is, until I read Charles Darwin’s biography and, as noted in my answer to the second question, found two pegs on which to hang the story for Fatally Inferior. My painstaking and extensive research finally paid off.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I hope my readers are mystified, surprised, and above all, entertained. The mystery stories I write have intricate plots and while I give the reader all the clues necessary to work out who did what, I like to think they will remain mystified to the last page. 

 

In addition to lots of twists and turns, my stories always contain one BIG surprise. My hope is that readers do not see this coming. 

 

My primary goal, though, is to entertain. Readers should walk away from my books saying, “That was a really enjoyable way to spend a few hours.”

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am completing The Séance of Murder, the third book in the Dunston Burnett Trilogy. This is a story of greed, set against the spiritualist movement that swept through England in the late 19th century. 

 

The tension between Dunston’s sleuthing limitations and the complex mysteries confronting him, the theme of the series, becomes more dire and personal in this story. The issue is whether Dunston will be able to expose the murderer of the heir to the Crenshaw Baronetcy before he himself is done away with. 

 

This book will be published in 2025.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Immortalised to Death was a First Place Category Winner in the Chanticleer International Book Awards. It also received a Kirkus Starred Review, and was a Booklife Editor’s Pick. Advance praise for Fatally Inferior describes the story as “a tale worthy of Willkie Collins himself.” (Mark Ellis, author of the acclaimed Frank Merlin London wartime detective series.)

 

To learn more about the Dunston Burnett Trilogy, please visit my website at https://www.lynsquiremysteries.com/ where you can also read about the best recently released mysteries in Lyn’s Picks.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Lyn Squire.