Crafting Cabaret Macabre by Tom Mead – ENGLAND

24th July 2024

WILLKOMMEN!: CRAFTING CABARET MACABRE by Tom Mead – ENGLAND.

My new novel Cabaret Macabre, a fresh entry in my Joseph Spector historical mystery series, has allowed me to indulge my love of locked-room puzzles, Golden Age Crime, the Gothic, illusion, and—as usual—a dash of dark humour. It’s been a joy to continue celebrating and subverting the classic themes of the vintage whodunit in a book that is deeply rooted not only in place and time, but also in genre. Now that it’s finished, I wanted to revisit some of its major inspirations and bid new readers bienvenue to the world of magician-detective Joseph Spector.

In terms of style, I was keen for Cabaret Macabre to have a theatrical feel, even though it takes place outside that milieu. That’s why I structured the mystery as a retelling/reimagining of the Jacobean drama The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton. Of course, it’s not a line-by-line rehash, but it retains the overarching themes of revenge, impersonation and copious double-crosses. It has always struck me how neatly Jacobean tragedy lends itself to the Golden Age Whodunit framework, and many of the greatest authors in the genre have made references to it. For instance, Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder features copious allusions to John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, while Caroline Graham’s The Killings at Badger’s Drift (adapted as the very first episode of TV’s Midsomer Murders) borrows major plot points from John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. There are so many other examples, and I thought it would be a bit of bloodthirsty fun to try something similar with Cabaret Macabre.

Buy Now

Honkaku Mysteries via Seattle Public Library

Aside from the Golden Age and Middleton’s masterpiece, one of my main influences was the traditional Japanese mystery, known as “honkaku.” These are puzzles taken to the extreme: they tend to be highly surreal in atmosphere and gruesome in content, with high body counts and brilliantly diverse methods of murder. Legendary honkaku authors include Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi, whose The Honjin Murders and The Noh Mask Murders have both been recently published in English and sparked a spate of English translations of other classic titles—a real treat for puzzle connoisseurs. Something all these great novels have in common is their reverence for the Golden Age, and most feature locked-room puzzles in the tradition of John Dickson Carr. So I thought it would be a fun challenge to bring the genre “full circle,” so to speak, by incorporating honkaku tropes into a Golden Age-style Western whodunit set at an archetypal English country house.

Since Joseph Spector is a conscious tribute to horror legends Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, I wanted to create a sense of eeriness and the uncanny to bring out the best in the character. Therefore, the house where most of the action takes place, Marchbanks, is a Gothic mansion in every sense of the word: a place of echoing corridors and shadowed passages. So, too, is The Grange, a private asylum where one of the key characters is incarcerated. One of the major influences on the tone and descriptions of the various settings is the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi classic The Black Cat. Taking the cinematic angle a step further, I opted to set the denouement at Shepperton Studios, which was known in the 1930s as “Sound City.” Therefore, the final confrontation with the killer takes place on the set of a Biblical epic, Salome, which seems a fitting substitute for the theatrical setting of the previous novel, The Murder Wheel, and its fairground finale. In general terms, my aim was to conjure a Grand Guignol-inspired backdrop for the sinister machinations of a diabolically ingenious killer.

But Cabaret Macabre is not entirely fantastical. As usual, I have made several references to real-life crimes; some of these are overt, while others are merely suggested by circumstance. Namechecked crimes include those of Christiana Edmunds (the “Chocolate Cream Poisoner”) and Thomas Neill Cream, another poisoner who is nonetheless a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders thanks to a (possibly apocryphal) confession as he was hanged. The book begins with a reference to Brighton’s notorious trunk murders of the 1930s, as well as the unconnected Charing Cross Trunk Murder of 1927—both major cause celebres at the time.

Buy Now

I can’t wait for readers to join faithful stalwarts Joseph Spector and George Flint of Scotland Yard for another complex puzzle. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay in the strange and haunted world of Cabaret Macabre. A word of warning, though: don’t believe everything you see…

TOM MEAD

Catch the author on Twitter X @TomMeadAuthor and IG @tommeadauthor 

Cabaret Macabre by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 1^st August at £20

Join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts