Ross Montgomery Guest Post

Two unlikely allies, one house full of secrets — in a world teetering on the brink of a suspected apocalypse, a resident of a well-protected mansion is found dead. Thrills, humor and suspense unfold in this locked-room mystery. Read on for an exclusive essay from Ross Montgomery on writing The Murder at World's End.

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When I first started putting together The Murder at World's End, I didn’t think I’d end up creating a murder mystery series with its own detective duo. I just wanted to write about my current obsession… which back then was the Halley’s Comet Panic of 1910.

A brief explanation: Halley’s Comet was scheduled to pass the Earth on May 19th, 1910. It only passes every 76 to 78 years, so this time round, scientists were keen to use all their exciting new equipment to study it. They studied the comet’s tail with a spectroscope, and discovered that it contained – among many other things – poisonous cyanogen gases. Astronomists then calculated that the comet would pass closer to the Earth this time than usual – we’d pass right through that cyanogen-filled tail.

Scientists reassured the world that there was nothing to fear, but it didn’t matter. Comets have always been seen as portents of the end of the world, and the spectroscope readings seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears. There were riots and stampedes. People built shelters and buried their love letters and bought anti-comet umbrellas. And then, of course… nothing happened. History carried on, and the event is now more or less forgotten, cropping up in articles about bizarre moments of history.

Which – as it just so happens — I love.

I knew I wanted to write about the Panic – I just couldn’t work out how. I played around with a few ideas, before realising that I could use the panic as a set-piece for another story: a good old fashioned murder mystery. A prepper Viscount, convinced that Halley’s Comet will end the world, seals up his mansion from top to bottom to make it impervious from poisonous gases. He then locks every guest and member of staff into separate bedrooms, so that they can safely wait out the apocalypse… but in the morning, the only person who’s dead is the Viscount himself, murdered with his own ancestral crossbow in a sealed room that nobody entered or left!

The rest of it came to me, piece by piece. I decided that I should have an upstairs-downstairs detective duo solving the case: on one side our narrator, Stephen Pike, a young manservant fresh out of Borstal and on his last chance. For his partner, I settled on Miss Decima Stockingham: the Viscount’s elderly aunt, an octogenarian scientific genius hidden away in the corner of the mansion for her own safety (and ours), with a mind like a bullwhip and a mouth like a sailor. I loved the idea of an unlikely Holmes and Watson pairing: a footman pushing around a cantankerous old dowager in a wicker bath chair, working together to secretly solve a case before the killer strikes again…

That was how the detective duo of Stockingham and Pike were born. I’m thrilled to announce that the sequel, The Shadows of Kensington Gore, will be out in America on January 12th – and this time, Stephen and Miss Decima will be solving their most fiendish case yet. Three Suffragettes are seen fleeing the scene when a police officer is brutally murdered in broad daylight – but of course, only Miss Decima is able to deduce that nothing is as it seems…

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