The Missing Wife is a new historical novel by Donna Gowland published by Sapere Books. The year is 1814 and 16-year-old Mary Godwin feels trapped in her prominent but stifling family. So when the Romantic poet Percy Shelley comes blazing into her life, threatening to commit suicide unless Mary runs away with him, she jumps at the chance of love and adventure. However, the love begins to sour when Mary and Percy find themselves in Paris, still a hotbed of revolutionary intrigue, low on cash and with ambiguous feelings for each other.
The Missing Wife works on two levels. Firstly, it is a brilliant depiction of young and naive love. This romantic portrayal leads the reader into the second storyline – the mystery of the missing wife, an investigation Mary and Percy pick up in Paris for some extra cash, when their passion for each other is already dimming. Donna Gowland weaves both of these storylines together brilliantly. You get a tangible sense of the literary life, complicated by young love, and the investigation goes from being a sidenote to a gripping mystery which places our young couple in mortal peril. But make no mistake, Mary is the dominant one in this pair, and as this is the first novel in a new series of ‘Mary Shelley Investigations’ then I cannot wait for her to return.
Donna Gowland agreed to answer some questions about The Missing Wife for the Venetian Vase.
Interviewer: Why did you choose Mary Godwin as your literary detective?
Donna Gowland: I have always been fascinated by the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (that’s a lot of surnames!) and felt that Frankenstein has overshadowed her life story. When you look at her story, it’s quite the tale – the early death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, her uneasy relationship with her stepmother and stepsisters, school in Dundee, meeting and romancing Percy Shelley and finally eloping with him to Paris when she was just sixteen years old. That is quite the starting point for a story.
Mary’s resolve, resilience and spirit has all too often been overlooked, or she has been seen as an adjunct of Percy Shelley, but she is a fascinating, multi-faceted character with great intelligence and pluck; I thought these characteristics would make her an excellent detective!
What I like about her as a detective is that through the course of the series she learns. She is not the complete article at the start of the story, the character goes on the journey with the readers; Mary is much wiser, maturer and sure of her skills by book six!
Interviewer: How would you describe your research process? Did you get to follow in Mary and Percy Shelley’s footsteps?
Donna Gowland: You would think I would have followed them to Paris, but I didn’t – I followed them to Geneva! (The location for book four), maybe I will go to Paris this year.
I knew something of Mary’s life story and the background to her meeting and falling in love with Percy Shelley, but what I love about writing historical fiction is the ability to use existing information as a framework and to populate the unspoken spaces with the key points of the narrative. That’s what I always aim to do.
I started out by building a timeline of 1814 from when they met to when they eloped and when they came back to London and built the fictional world around it. I read everything I could by and about Mary Shelley, her fiction, her letters and journals (and those of Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont) and tried to picture the key points along the way and used that to research some of the details that make you feel like you are on the trip with them – Mary refusing to swim naked in a lake is a true story, so is their purchase of a donkey (though I don’t think it was called Napoleon!). For me, it is important to fuse the historical and the fictional to create an immersive, engaging experience for the reader – I have lost count of the readers who have told me the donkey is their favourite character!
The next step was building the characters and the nuances of the murder-mystery plot, ensuring there was cohesion in the plot and characters and a satisfying resolution. I really enjoy the research process – as much as (if not more than) the writing process.
Interviewer: Was there anything about the characters that surprised you as were writing the book?
Donna Gowland: The ebbs and flows of the relationships between the characters surprised me, how naturally it had the sense of characters trying to ‘fit together’ when they were thrown into a completely alien environment. Jane (now known as Claire Clairmont) and Mary’s relationship dynamic shifted substantially once Mary being romantically attached to Percy Shelley and it was interesting to write the way they all navigated the relationships.
Percy Shelly disappointed me a little bit too. I’ve always seen him as something of a romantic hero, but the more research I did into him as a character the more his human foibles were exposed, and they translated onto the page as someone with a bit of a disconnect between the ‘myth’ and ‘reality’ of the man. The depth of feeling between him and Mary was undeniable though, it’s a shame their love story had such a tragic end after so many trials, tribulations and turns.
Interviewer: Could you name some of the authors who have inspired your writing?
Donna Gowland: Agatha Christie is the first one who springs to mind, the absolute queen of the genre: Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Ellroy – so many! I’ve got quite a vast and eclectic taste, so I take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. There are lots of authors whose writing makes me put down the book and wish that I had written that! Jenn Ashworth’s short story ‘The Women’s Union of Relief’ is one of the best short stories I have ever read in my life, it is right up there with Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ Jane Burn (poet) and Amanda Huggins (particularly her amazing short stories about Japan) weave words like nobody else. I really enjoyed Laura Martin’s ‘Jane Austen Investigations’ and Alexandra Benedict’s ‘Murder on The Christmas Express.’
I really enjoy well-carved writing; where every word does something, every word counts! My first English teacher told me my writing was verbose, I crave clean, crisp sentences.
Interviewer: Could you give a little hint as to Mary’s next adventure.
Donna Gowland: In ‘The Lost Girls’ (to be released on August 15th, 2025) Mary, Percy and Claire have returned to London triumphant but penniless and the months of penury are taking their toll on relationships. Claire witnesses a murder, but when they go back to the scene of the crime the body has disappeared! Mary’s friend and former housekeeper calls upon her to investigate a run-away servant which leads them on to an adventure involving the criminal underworld of London, science, and galvanism!
Ellroy Reads – Black and Blue by Ian Rankin
I have a very special episode of Ellroy Reads for you today. I take a look at Ian Rankin’s breakout novel Black and Blue, and describe how it was inspired by James Ellroy’s appearance as the Guest of Honour at Bouchercon in Nottingham, 1995. I also talk about how James Ellroy gave Rankin his label as the ‘King of Tartan Noir’.
An Explosion in New Ferry
My wife and I moved to Bebington in August 2016. It was an exciting time as we had bought our first house together. We loved Liverpool but we were ready for a change. We had lived for many years in a bedsit in Kensington and the crime and poverty in ‘Kenny’, as the locals call it, had really soured us on the city. A move to the Wirral promised a fresh start and our house was perfectly situated, just a few minutes walk from Bebington railway station, the beautiful Port Sunlight Village and New Ferry. We expected a quieter, more sedate life, and it was, until one night a shocking event made the area the subject of national television and press coverage.
On March 25, 2017, my wife and I were at home watching the film A United Kingdom when the house seemed to shake from the foundations upwards by this loud bang. I thought someone had ramrodded a car through the door. After letting slip some choice language, I decided to investigate. I went out into the street and saw other people stumble out of their homes in morbid and shocked curiosity. I followed the sound of the explosion. The ‘Homes in Style’ furniture shop adjoining a dance studio in New Ferry had been set alight less than half a mile from us. There was smoke in the air and a metallic tang penetrated the back of my throat the nearer I got to the epicentre of the blast. I was walking towards the area other people were streaming away from in a general state of chaos. It looked like a war zone. The emergency services arrived and shooed me back. I’m not claiming any sense of bravery in walking towards the blast. I went through a combined sense of shock, curiosity and a vague notion that I might be able to help. I was of no help, as it happens, and returned home.
The explosion, which was described in court as ‘colossal’, had been caused by Pascal Blasio, who was the owner of ‘Homes in Style’. He was deeply in debt and started the blaze in a desperate and cack-handed attempt to swindle the insurers out of £50,000. Blasio had removed the insured furniture from the store the day before the explosion. His harebrained scheme cost 78 people their homes, and caused 81 physical injuries, at least one of which was life-changing; it was so severe. As if by a miracle, no one was killed. Blasio was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for causing the explosion, and eight years for fraud to be served concurrently.
After a day or two, the story slipped from national attention. The people who were the most deeply affected had to struggle with the misery Blasio had unleashed on their lives by detonating the largest explosion in Merseyside since World War Two. In many ways, life went to back to normal and the area became the peaceful community that attracts so many city dwellers looking for a quieter life.
But none of us who heard that explosion and witnessed its aftermath will ever forget that fiery night in New Ferry.
James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction
For the latest episode of Ellroy Reads, I talk about the process of getting my PhD on James Ellroy published into the book James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction. Writing this book was crucial to me landing the role of Ellroy’s biographer several years later.
Hope you enjoy the episode and please remember to subscribe. I’ve decided to take an extended break from X so I can focus on my latest book-length manuscript, which is due in a few months. Hopefully staying off X will stop me from offending any Michael Jackson fans as well! I’ll still be posting on this website and on YouTube as well.
Ellroy Reads – Little Odessa by Joseph Koenig
For the latest episode of Ellroy Reads, I discuss a great living writer who doesn’t receive much attention anymore, but was once tipped to be one of the greatest stars of crime fiction. Joseph Koenig burst onto the scene in 1986 with Floater which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Debut Novel, but it was his follow-up Little Odessa which really brought him to the brink of stardom.
I talk about Koenig’s enigmatic persona, his friendship with James Ellroy and why he disappeared from view for nearly twenty years. Enjoy the episode!
A Body in Blacon
I grew up in Blacon, Chester. Blacon has a reputation for being one of the roughest areas in Chester, which will strike some of my British readers as a contradiction in terms. Chester is a beautiful historic city in the north-west of England, famous for its Roman Walls and Tudor Rows. It’s a scenic and relaxing place to explore on foot. Retired LAPD detective Rick Jackson once told me he visited Chester after a particularly traumatic homicide case. He needed somewhere peaceful to unwind, as far away from Los Angeles as possible. Chester has always been a great place to visit.
Nevertheless, Chester does have it rougher areas and Blacon is one of them. When I was a child, the rumour was that Blacon was the largest council estate in Europe. I don’t know how much truth there was in that. Since the early 1980s, council housing has steadily been sold off in Britain. Blacon itself is an architectural hotchpotch with old army housing standing alongside high rise flats. My parents enrolled me at the Bishop’s Blue Coat Church of England High School in Boughton. My older siblings had gone to Blacon High School, but my mum and dad felt that I would be better served in a school out of town. It was at high school that I began to realise how different my upbringing was from a lot of the other pupils. They hailed from the wealthier areas of Chester such as Upton and Handbridge, and for them Blacon was a dirty word at best, an aberration at worst.
One day when I was sixteen, I witnessed something that brought home just how ‘other’ Blacon was to the rest of Chester.
My friend Neil had a weekend job refereeing football matches. One morning, I went to watch Neil referee in Clifton Drive, which was at the bottom of a small hill directly below my family home. I went along to the game with another friend, Siddy. There was a clearing near the football field where cars would park and the drivers would engage in drugs, dogging and God knows what else. The clearing was empty when we arrived, moments before the match started. By half-time, Siddy and I were bored so we left. As we departed we noticed there was a car parked in the clearing. It had not been there when we arrived. The passenger door was ajar. Something from inside the car was holding the passenger door open. Siddy and I looked at each other quizzically. Something wasn’t right here, we told each other silently.
We approached the car and saw that it was a lifeless body holding the door open. The driver’s side was empty. From memory, the car had a nardo grey paint coating but it may have been a cheaper knock-off. The dashboard was littered with powder, a burnt-spoon, a plastic bag and various other items of drug paraphernalia. The passenger had overdosed and tried to exit the car as he was dying. He died half-in, half-out of the car. The driver had fled in panic, leaving behind a corpse in his car. It had all happened in the first half of the football match, while we were watching Neil referee the game. A crowd began to gather. Siddy and I were doped up to our gills on pot, my vice at the time, and we didn’t want to hang around for the police, so we left.
We never heard anything else about the corpse in the nardo grey car.
Postscript: I’ve shared this story from my past as it is the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, and it felt appropriate for a crime-oriented website to share a True Crime story of my own.
One of the reasons I am grateful for this blog is for the opportunity to promote my work to an international audience. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy received excellent publicity in the UK, with great reviews in all of the leading newspapers. But it barely received any coverage in the US, even after it won the Edgar Award for Best Biography. So without this website, many readers in the States, including Ellroy fans, would not have heard of the book.
Thanks for reading and here’s to the next sixteen years.
Ellroy Reads – Six Days of the Condor by James Grady
Six Days of the Condor by James Grady is one of the most stunning debuts in genre fiction. At the age of twenty-five Grady was catapulted to literary stardom, helped in no small part by the successful film adaptation Three Days of the Condor.
I talk about Grady’s incredible journey as a writer in the latest episode of Ellroy Reads. I also talk about his friendship with James Ellroy, and the episode begins with a brief message from the show’s ‘sponsor’.
If you like what you see, why not subscribe and join the ever-growing Ellroy community.
Andy Rohmer is the pseudonym of Eduardo Ramos, a Portuguese diplomat who, in recent years, has written some wonderful books on film criticism. First, there was the Writers-On-Film series, which looked at every novel in certain authors careers and every film adaptation it inspired. Now Rohmer is working on the World History: The Hollywood Version series, which looks at a specific period of history and the high and lows of every Hollywood film it has inspired.
There are probably more films about World War Two than there were volunteers in the Home Guard, so readers may be relieved to hear that Rohmer is going through history chronologically and his latest volume focuses on Early Antiquity, which Rohmer defines as 10,000 to 480 BCE. Film buffs will delight in his choices. Do you want to read about how director Robert Aldrich put the lamentable fate of Sodom and Gomorrah onscreen? This is the book for you. Was Rossana Podesta alluring enough to play Helen of Troy and become the face that launched a thousand ships? Rohmer has the answer.
Andy Rohmer is an amalgam of Andrew Sarris, the film critic, and Éric Rohmer, the filmmaker. Eduardo Ramos has chosen his pseudonym wisely. His books are full of love for cinema, a witty appreciation of when it goes horribly wrong, ‘ignore the camels’ he says of The Ten Commandants as they weren’t present in the Middle East until about a thousand years after the film is set, and most of all, an enduring wonder at everything cinema can achieve.
Add World History: The Hollywood Version – Early Antiquity to your library, and perhaps you might want to check out the other volumes Rohmer has written.
Ellroy Reads – The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh
Before I introduce the latest episode of Ellroy Reads I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who responded to my request to review Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy on Amazon and/or Goodreads. You have tilted the review average away from the trolls who were leaving one-star reviews after my online dust-up with them. There’s still time to review the book if you haven’t already. Every honest review helps.
In this week’s episode, I discuss Joseph Wambaugh’s non-fiction classic The Onion Field, which concerns the kidnapping of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and the subsequent murder of Campbell. James Ellroy always loved the book and spoke at a memorial to Ian Campbell in 2012. Watch till the end of the episode. I give an update on how I came to be the target of online trolls, for those of you who are interested.
Ellroy Reads – Gideon’s Day by John Creasey
Ellroy Reads is back with a look at Gideon’s Day by John Creasey. Often considered the father of the police procedural novel, Creasey was phenomenally prolific and successful as an author and Gideon’s Day is the novel that launched his Superintendent/Commander Gideon of Scotland Yard series.
I also give a brief update at the end of the episode about events I alluded to in my previous post on this website. Thanks for watching everyone and do remember to subscribe for more great episodes delivered straight to your inbox.
The Venetian Vase 