William Monk 02 - A Dangerous Mourning

but why?
Of course, Monk doesn’t go on seeking himself forever, that would become boring; but there is always this awareness that he was not very nice, and he can’t defend himself because he doesn’t know why. He is more acerbic than Thomas Pitt, and not as kind. Monk is clever yet vulnerable, a bit quick to judge. Pitt is not a troubled character. He deals with ethical issues, of course, things we all have to deal with, but he is not as complex as Monk.
    M: What are the challenges of writing an amnesiac main character?
    AP: It was a lot of fun for seven or eight books, but then it was enough. In
Death of a Stranger
, Monk really comes to peace with it and moves on, and now there is really only a very casual mention of his amnesia. It’s been quite an interesting challenge, to write about the condition. No one yet has come up to me to say that he or she hadamnesia and it was not like that—and one or two have said it did feel that way and was accurate. I don’t really know as much about it, except that it is very unlikely that Monk would actually one day get his memory back. That would be medically inaccurate. So the poor soul must be held in suspense. It gives Monk an extra edge of anxiety and eventually a sense of compassion to be forced to move around in the dark.
    M : Will Monk ever find real happiness?
    AP: Of course he does marry Hester Latterly eventually, but they don’t have children. Hester needs to stay active, to keep doing what she does, rather than to stay home and look after children. Besides, it would make them too much like the Pitts. They do, however, have a special relationship with a local mudlark. Do you know what a mudlark was? Mudlarks were little boys who lived along the edge of the Thames, hunting for debris that would be valuable.
    M : Is that like a tosher, which you write about in
A Dangerous Mourning?
    AP: Mudlarks are like toshers in that they salvage things that people have lost, but toshers work in the sewers and mudlarks are children. Well, there is a boy, about eleven years old, a little mudlark, a skinny little kid, who helps Monk when he becomes a river policeman. Scuff is his name, and he adopts Monk to look after him. They adopt each other, really. (Hester and Monk don’t formally adopt him—he’s eleven—but he will deign to look after them.) That’s the nearest they come to having a child. Scuff is an independent little soul and he pops up again in
The Shifting Tide
, which actually has in it the worst nightmare that I could ever possibly imagine.
    M : Your worst nightmare? How intriguing. What is it?
    AP: Hester gets to run a clinic for street prostitutes, and one woman comes to the clinic with a fever and dies. When Hester is dressing the body she discovers buboes under the dead woman’s arm: the Black Death, bubonic plague. But even more astonishing is the discoverythat the woman has been murdered. Imagine that: The whole clinic goes into complete lockdown and they can’t let anyone know why, and those who try to run will have their throats ripped out by patrol dogs. Hester is shut inside a clinic with people who could develop the plague, and one of them is a murderer. There are lots of ways to go, but this must surely be the worst.
    M : That’s wonderfully ghastly. How do you come up with your ideas for the crimes and mysteries at the heart of each book?
    AP: Mostly I look at events happening today and backdate them. Often it’s either a social issue we haven’t yet solved or a moral/emotional issue that is timeless. The new Monk novel I’m working on is based around the question of family loyalties, among other things. For instance, if you discover that someone like your mother or father is charged with a crime you couldn’t possibly excuse, how would you react? I think it’s your natural instinct to say, “Certainly not, I’ll never believe it,” but then how far would you actually go to defend that person you love? It’s a very interesting issue of how you deal with disillusion. Do you blame the person who wasn’t what you expected? Do you blame everyone but yourself? I don’t know that anyone can be sure until he or she is facing it, then and there.
    So, as I said, it’s either a social issue that is current or an emotional or moral issue that is eternal, or something very present-day that I backdate. For example, the Patriot Act in America. When the Patriot Act first came out, do you remember stories about people making lists of what others