Photograph: Moho Film/Allstarīut I also find various inheritance scenarios being tried out in the form of flowcharts. a thief, a pickpocket.”ĭeliriously good … Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden transports the story to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. My title comes from Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Historical Slang: “Finger-smith. Looking back now at my research, I find detailed notes about Victorian criminal life, along with page after page of juicy street vocabulary. Well, in true sensation-novel style, it all gets slightly giddy-making, and there were times when even I struggled to keep on top of the complications.

The resulting plot sees “baby farmer” Mrs Sucksby sending her foster daughter Sue to work as a maid for a lonely heiress – and to persuade her to marry a conman, who intends to then lock her away in a madhouse. With that in place, my task became to think backwards, working out my characters and their involvement in the scam, deciding who stood to gain what and why.

It won a Dracula Society award, for which I was presented with a handmade tombstone with two swaddled babies at the footĪctually, the homage extended to a bit of pilfering: my starting point was to “borrow” a wonderful twist from Collins’s The Woman in White. I decided to bring these two worlds together in a way that would, I hoped, pay homage to both. But it’s also full of female protagonists who are swindlers and schemers in their own right – women who are glorious transgressors of social norms. The sensation novel teems with “ladies in peril”, vulnerable women and girls who are victims on a grand scale. Mayhew’s interviewees include hawkers, vagrants, orphaned children: figures on the edges of mainstream culture but with a complex culture of their own.

What appealed to me about these worlds was the room they give to marginalised voices, the way they overturn our stereotypes of Victorian gentility. The first was that of working-class life as it emerges from the interviews carried out by journalist Henry Mayhew for his brilliantly evocative book London Labour and the London Poor the second was that of “sensation” fiction, the blockbuster genre established in the 1860s by novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose tales of gothic melodrama revel in themes of domestic violence, secrets, and lost and shifting identities. It shares their 19th-century setting, but it was inspired by two particular Victorian worlds. F ingersmith was my third novel, after Tipping the Velvet and Affinity.

Author fingersmith