Talking Location With author Mark Ellis – WW2 LONDON

4th June 2022

#TalkingLocationWith... Mark Ellis, author of Dead in the Water, set in WW2 LONDON

Researching Frank Merlin’s Wartime London

I write a series about DCI Frank Merlin, a Scotland Yard detective working in World War 2 London. There are five books in the series with the fifth, Dead In The Water, out this month. My aim has always been to follow Merlin’s adventures right through the war at six to nine monthly intervals. The first Merlin book, Princes Gate, was set in January 1940 and subsequent books have been set in September 1940 (Stalin’s Gold), June 1941 (Merlin At War) , December 1941 (A Death In Mayfair) and June 1942 (Dead In The Water). I am aiming to set the as yet untitled Merlin 6 in the spring of 1943.

There are two main stars in my series. One is Frank Merlin, and the other is wartime London. While the city is not the only setting for my books, most of the action takes place there. Foreign parts such as Crete, Paris, Moscow, New York, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Lisbon have had occasional cameo roles. By the summer of 1942, the period setting of Dead In The Water, London has survived the appalling horrors of the Blitz but continues to suffer severely from the harsh conditions and deprivations of war. Much of the city is in ruins. There is strict food, clothing and petrol rationing. There is the blackout. And the city is prey to a rampant crime wave.

Locations in and around London which figure in the Merlin stories include old Scotland Yard, which as Merlin’s place of work naturally features often, Chelsea, where he has his home, Soho, the port of London and the East End. As is hinted by the title, the River Thames and its environs are particularly prominent in Dead In The Water. One of the book’s principal characters lives in a house overlooking the river in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, and a good deal of the story action takes place in and around his home. I used to live in a block of flats in Flood Street (incidentally the scene of a murder in one of my other books), just around the corner from Cheyne Walk, so know the location well. The area has some interesting history. Henry the Eighth had a Manor House in Cheyne Walk, and his daughter Elizabeth planted some famous mulberry trees there when she was Queen. Because of my familiarity, I was a little too relaxed about doing my usual location ground research at the outset. When I finally got round to visiting  I was already two thirds of the way through the book. It was a good job I did though, as I found I’d made a number of descriptive mistakes. For example I’d got the height of the river wall at that part of the Thames wrong and this is a matter which has bearing on the plot.

I do a considerable amount of research before starting each book. In the process of writing five wartime novels I have inevitably acquired a lot of general knowledge about World War Two and life on the Home Front, but always need to spend time concentrating on the specific period which is to feature in my story. It is during this intensive research that my plot ideas usually emerge. For example, during my preparatory reading on Merlin 4, A Death In Mayfair, I came across a book about the wartime British film industry which proved inspirational. The movie business was particularly vibrant during the war and there were numerous film studios in and around London, some still surviving today, some defunct. I made a point of visiting the locations of some of the old studios. Alexander Korda, the model for the fictional film producer character in the book, had a film studio in Denham, to the north west of London. However, the fictional studio I eventually created in the book owed more physically to Bray Studios, which has a fascinating history and is still going strong besides the Thames near Windsor.

Returning to Dead In The Water, other London locations which feature include Soho Square, the Chiswick riverbank, Knightsbridge, Harrow, Hammersmith and the City of London. I reconnoitred them all. Unfortunately, Covid travel restrictions prohibited me from visiting the few foreign locations in the story, such as Lisbon and Moscow, but I did have the memory of previous journeys there to draw on. I hope it’s not tempting fate too much to venture that such limitations will not apply to my ground research for Merlin 6!

Mark Ellis

Catch Mark on Twitter

Buy Now

Dead In The Water by Mark Ellis is out now in paperback by Headline Accent, £9.99

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts