David Fairer – Wigs, Swords and Poison: Writing Murder Mysteries set in Queen Anne’s London

After forty years researching and teaching eighteenth-century literature, Emeritus Professor David Fairer is now attempting to bring the age alive in a series of novels, the Chocolate House Mysteries. Centred on a Covent Garden chocolate house, these books combine historical fact and fiction, with their plots built around the actual events of 1708.

Writing a historical ‘whodunit’ raises particular challenges and questions. How did men and women in 1708 conceive of such things as evidence, clues, blackmail, bribery, interrogation and teamwork? How did they conceive of the notion of ‘detection’ itself, when there were no policemen and no detectives, no experts, no teams, no concept of crime scenes or forensics?

Have a listen to ‘Wigs, Swords and Poison’ to find the answers to these questions!

Further reading:

David Fairer, Chocolate House Treason: A Mystery of Queen Anne’s London (Matador, 2019) https://davidfairer.com.

Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (Secker & Warburg, 1956).

Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004).

Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses (George Allen and Unwin, 1963).

John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (Chatto & Windus, 1929).

About the speaker:

David Fairer is Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, where he has taught since 1976. His historical whodunit, Chocolate House Treason, was published in 2019.