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When I finished The Tea Rose, I actually – foolishly – thought I was finished with Fiona Finnegan and her family. After all, it had taken over ten years of my life to write that book and I needed a break. I soon found out, however, that these characters weren’t finished with me. I wasn’t planning on writing a second book, not at all, but after a few weeks after The Tea Rose was published, I found myself wondering what that girl was up to, and missing Joe and Seamie, and most of all, wondering what on earth was going to become of Charlie, Fiona’s blacksheep brother – now Sid Malone. At the same time, out of nowhere, this new character materialized in my head – a young, idealistic woman doctor. A counterpoint to Malone. I knew what she looked like and that she was Maud’s sister. Why Maud’s sister? God only knows. I knew she was a dedicated physician, a social reformer, and as committed to the public good as Sid Malone was to his own dark pursuits. I also knew she was a wounded soul. Like Sid. And I knew that they would meet in the only place in London where two such characters could meet in 1900 – Whitechapel. And after that, I was off. The game was afoot. I knew where the story was going and how it was going to get there – but of course, as in any 725 page novel set a hundred years in the past, a little bit of research had to get done. Research – as much as the characters and their story and its setting – is a huge part of what inspires me as a writer. I use many sources. General histories. Memoirs. Biographies. Diaries. Photographs. Newspapers. The list is endless. But one of my best resources both for The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose wasn’t a book or a photograph. It was a man. His name was Fred Sage and he was a Londoner through and through. I met Fred on my first research trip to London for The Tea Rose. He had retired from the docks and was working as a historian of East and Southeast London. He called himself The Sage of the Docklands. I’d contacted him from New York and made arrangements to meet. I told him I was working on a novel set in Wapping and Whitechapel and wanted to learn as much about river work as I could. Fred took me around Wapping and Rotherhithe. He told me of London. His London and his father’s. He told me of backbreaking work. Of hard living. Of strikes and fights and Saturday nights. Of times and places and women and men the like of whom this world will never see again. We must’ve made an odd sight – a Cockney docker dressed in a suit and tie, striding down the ruined lanes of Wapping, pointing out warehouses and wharves, and bits of rusted machinery and what they’d been used for, and a breathless American in sneakers and jeans trotting after him, scribbling notes. Fred had a few years on me, but he could walk the legs off a mountain goat. Fred gave me a lot of valuable information on the docks and dockwork, but he gave me something else, something even more important – a glimpse of a vanished East London. And of his love for it. I’d never seen that before – such a strong love for a city and a people and a life. A life that wasn’t rosy, or easy, or lovely…but real. Fred Sage passed away while The Winter Rose was being written and I’ve dedicated the book to him. It’s hard to think of London without him in it, and hard to think of him anywhere but in London, but I like to imagine him sitting in heaven now, telling God that creating the world’s a hard bit of graft an’ all, but if He wants to see what real work’s all about, He should come down the London docks. Goodbye, Fred. And thank you.
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