Seb Duncan's Blog
February 18, 2024
Top Boy, an electric potato and an air balloon over the Pyramids. Just what the hell is going on in Seb Duncan’s new novel?
I’m going to tell you a story.
A teenage boy is tricked into committing a crime by an elder. The boy then becomes a gang member and rises through the ranks by snagging more recruits, and so the cycle continues.
Sounds familiar? Thought so.
No, it’s not an episode of Top Boy but a Victorian fable that was, like the hit Netflix series, based on real life; the idea that child exploitation was rife in the 19th Century, and is still part of the experience of inner-city teenagers today, is an interesting one and this was the springboard for my new novel, The Book of Thunder and Lightning. But I needed more research, so I dug deeper.
Written in 1896, A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, was the sad story of a young boy getting caught up in crime, culminating in him being killed in a knife fight. Although the book was less famous than Dickens’ Oliver Twist, it caused a stir at the time, dividing opinion, with some critics saying it glamorised inner-city violence and others saying it exaggerated it. After reading the book, I couldn’t help feeling that this portrayal of a young London life was the same story taking place in 21st Century London. Britain in many ways had once again become ‘Victorian’.
As part of my research journey I took a walk to the very area where this story took place: a slum called the Old Nichol, now called the Boundary Estate. I soon discovered that Arnold Circus - its round park I was standing in - was built upon the torn down bricks of that Victorian neighbourhood. The poetry struck me like a cosh round the head on a foggy night in Limehouse. It was beginning of my next story, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone. The opening words of the book introduced this idea:
Arnold Circus
In 1889 the demolition teams came.
They levelled The Old Nichol, only leaving fragments of the past behind -
Boundary Passage, Old Nichol Street, Chance Street. Some others.
By 1900, The Boundary Estate was built.
Tall, orange-bricked flats sprang up, with shared stairwells
and large windows that let in the light from wide tree-lined avenues.
A round central park, Arnold Circus, was built in the estate’s centre.
It was constructed on a six-foot mound
using thousands of bricks from the old torn down houses.
For some reason, the architect had insisted that precisely six trees be planted in a circle.
They remain there to this day.
But I needed an angle, a twist. After a few weeks down the research rabbit hole, I came across a strange, illustrated book from the 19th Century called Thunder and Lightning. The author and adventurer was a sort of Phileas Fogg character who was also obsessed with lightning and had catalogued all his research in meticulous detail while floating around the world in his air balloon.
After a few weeks, I climbed out of my lightning-filled rabbit hole, dusted myself down, and returned to that innocent boy from Morrison’s book. What if the boy had also come across this book, I thought? It was certainly possible. What about if he had a mentor who helped him read? What about if this innocent boy learns about electricity, it empowers him, and he becomes a vigilante. This was beginning to sound like a Gothic version of Top Boy.
Now all I needed was a villain.
Way back in 2019, I remembered a walk to Hoxton Street took me to a strange shop that seemed at odds with the cafes dotted along it. The Victorian style windows of The Hoxton Monster Supplies contained all sorts of gentle horror props and tropes that I loved as a kid. Jars of ‘The Thickest Human Snot’ sat next to cans of ‘A Vague Sense of Unease’. I’m sure there were some eyeballs involved as well. But what was this place? I subsequently found out that it was a community space run by The Ministry of Stories for encouraging creative writing in children. All the stranger as it had links with the university where I ended up studying my MA a year later. Coincidence or fate? I don’t really believe in coincidence.
That shop visit inspired me to write the first words to The Book of Thunder and Lightning. I wanted to get a sense of a boy entering a dangerous world where anything could happen:
Dark blue door. Filthy windows.
Doormats stacked up next to brass lamps and coal buckets.
Everyone knew Hush’s Haberdashers in The Old Nichol.
Tom entered the shop and Theodore Hush appeared from a tiny opening in the wall of goods piled high and wide on the counter.
He had a thin, mean face.
The shop always smelt of damp wood mixed with paraffin.
Hundreds of mouse traps hung from the low ceiling and shiny white moth balls
spilled out of glass jars like dead eyes.
So, I had a protagonist (the boy), a villain (Hush) and a setting (the Old Nichol). But what about the potato? I hear you say. Well, you’ll just have to buy the book to find out.
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
A teenage boy is tricked into committing a crime by an elder. The boy then becomes a gang member and rises through the ranks by snagging more recruits, and so the cycle continues.
Sounds familiar? Thought so.
No, it’s not an episode of Top Boy but a Victorian fable that was, like the hit Netflix series, based on real life; the idea that child exploitation was rife in the 19th Century, and is still part of the experience of inner-city teenagers today, is an interesting one and this was the springboard for my new novel, The Book of Thunder and Lightning. But I needed more research, so I dug deeper.
Written in 1896, A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, was the sad story of a young boy getting caught up in crime, culminating in him being killed in a knife fight. Although the book was less famous than Dickens’ Oliver Twist, it caused a stir at the time, dividing opinion, with some critics saying it glamorised inner-city violence and others saying it exaggerated it. After reading the book, I couldn’t help feeling that this portrayal of a young London life was the same story taking place in 21st Century London. Britain in many ways had once again become ‘Victorian’.
As part of my research journey I took a walk to the very area where this story took place: a slum called the Old Nichol, now called the Boundary Estate. I soon discovered that Arnold Circus - its round park I was standing in - was built upon the torn down bricks of that Victorian neighbourhood. The poetry struck me like a cosh round the head on a foggy night in Limehouse. It was beginning of my next story, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone. The opening words of the book introduced this idea:
Arnold Circus
In 1889 the demolition teams came.
They levelled The Old Nichol, only leaving fragments of the past behind -
Boundary Passage, Old Nichol Street, Chance Street. Some others.
By 1900, The Boundary Estate was built.
Tall, orange-bricked flats sprang up, with shared stairwells
and large windows that let in the light from wide tree-lined avenues.
A round central park, Arnold Circus, was built in the estate’s centre.
It was constructed on a six-foot mound
using thousands of bricks from the old torn down houses.
For some reason, the architect had insisted that precisely six trees be planted in a circle.
They remain there to this day.
But I needed an angle, a twist. After a few weeks down the research rabbit hole, I came across a strange, illustrated book from the 19th Century called Thunder and Lightning. The author and adventurer was a sort of Phileas Fogg character who was also obsessed with lightning and had catalogued all his research in meticulous detail while floating around the world in his air balloon.
After a few weeks, I climbed out of my lightning-filled rabbit hole, dusted myself down, and returned to that innocent boy from Morrison’s book. What if the boy had also come across this book, I thought? It was certainly possible. What about if he had a mentor who helped him read? What about if this innocent boy learns about electricity, it empowers him, and he becomes a vigilante. This was beginning to sound like a Gothic version of Top Boy.
Now all I needed was a villain.
Way back in 2019, I remembered a walk to Hoxton Street took me to a strange shop that seemed at odds with the cafes dotted along it. The Victorian style windows of The Hoxton Monster Supplies contained all sorts of gentle horror props and tropes that I loved as a kid. Jars of ‘The Thickest Human Snot’ sat next to cans of ‘A Vague Sense of Unease’. I’m sure there were some eyeballs involved as well. But what was this place? I subsequently found out that it was a community space run by The Ministry of Stories for encouraging creative writing in children. All the stranger as it had links with the university where I ended up studying my MA a year later. Coincidence or fate? I don’t really believe in coincidence.
That shop visit inspired me to write the first words to The Book of Thunder and Lightning. I wanted to get a sense of a boy entering a dangerous world where anything could happen:
Dark blue door. Filthy windows.
Doormats stacked up next to brass lamps and coal buckets.
Everyone knew Hush’s Haberdashers in The Old Nichol.
Tom entered the shop and Theodore Hush appeared from a tiny opening in the wall of goods piled high and wide on the counter.
He had a thin, mean face.
The shop always smelt of damp wood mixed with paraffin.
Hundreds of mouse traps hung from the low ceiling and shiny white moth balls
spilled out of glass jars like dead eyes.
So, I had a protagonist (the boy), a villain (Hush) and a setting (the Old Nichol). But what about the potato? I hear you say. Well, you’ll just have to buy the book to find out.
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
The inspiration engine behind The Book of Thunder and Lightning
Just what is it about writers and their characters? For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by how good authors create them. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson became the template for so many future horror films centering on character transformation and the axis of good versus evil. However, academics have said that the story is just as much about the act of writing itself. The writer becomes the character, while he is also ‘himself’; an act of induced schizophrenia. David Morley writes that when in the flow of writing, it is almost as if the writer has gone native with their created personae or characters, like an actor staying in role to explore their stage or movie character to its fingertips (2007).
For James Joyce, inspiration came from the people in his mother city. In Dubliners, Joyce’s daily walks around that city’s streets were meticulously recorded on paper and stitched together in short, snappy chapters of modern life; the Eastenders of their time, gritty and unvarnished. These characters were then expanded alongside the Greek myth of Homer’s Odyssey to form Joyce’s sprawling masterpiece, Ulysses. The combination of these two ideas (real life with Homeric myth) created one of Modernism’s greatest characters, Leopold Bloom, the everyman we can all relate to. The book is moving, entertaining and downright confounding in equal measures; everyday life can sometimes feel like an epic pain in the (insert noun) and we are all in it together, in case you hadn’t noticed.
So, with the alchemy of self (or various selves) combined with that magic ‘second’ element (or a second story, like Homer’s Odyssey) there is potential to make an interesting new story. For The Book of Thunder and Lightning, my inspiration engine was a 2021 walk to a neighbourhood called The Boundary Estate in London’s Shoreditch. The epigraph from the novel sets the scene:
Arnold Circus
In 1889 the demolition teams came.
They levelled The Old Nichol, only leaving fragments of the past behind -
Boundary Passage, Old Nichol Street, Chance Street. Some others.
By 1900, The Boundary Estate was built.
Tall orange-bricked flats sprang up, with shared stairwells
and large windows that let in the light from wide tree-lined avenues.
A round central park, Arnold Circus, was built in the estate’s centre.
It was constructed on a six foot mound
using thousands of bricks from the old torn down houses.
For some reason, the architect had insisted that precisely six trees be planted in a circle.
They remain there to this day.
What followed was a year of historical research that unearthed all sorts of characters that had been lurking in wait behind dormant lumps of grey matter; the main character Tom Baxter, tricked into a life of crime; the nasty old Fence, Theodore Hush; Arthur Snipe, the toxic east end king pin, slithering up the greasy pole of respectability. The only exception was Simon Beaver, resident of the Boundary Estate and hack journalist who becomes an unlikely hero. This was autobiographical (kind of) and his life of buses and private tutoring is very much a part of my day to day existence. But apart from him (or me), all the characters seemed to unfurl from that first visit to that neighbourhood and were a result of that magic formula (unexpected place + real history = new characters).
However, I am cheating (ever so slightly). If I was to point to a third element, it would be A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896), the sad story of a young boy from ‘The Old Nichol’ who gets caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminates in him being killed in a knife fight. This book was my first port of call after I discovered that the Nichol was buried beneath what is now The Boundary Estate, and was without a doubt a massive inspiration. It’s just that, for me, it wasn’t enough to simply re-visit the story of a boy being dragged into a life of crime and leave it at that. My character had to have this additional dimension; he was obsessed with electricity, which surely must have seemed like a type of magic to a working class boy growing up in the 1800s:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C Clarke
So there you have it. My path to creating interesting characters; a good walk to a new place followed by a whole load of historical research, combined with a little bit of electricity...
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
Reference
Morley, David, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
For James Joyce, inspiration came from the people in his mother city. In Dubliners, Joyce’s daily walks around that city’s streets were meticulously recorded on paper and stitched together in short, snappy chapters of modern life; the Eastenders of their time, gritty and unvarnished. These characters were then expanded alongside the Greek myth of Homer’s Odyssey to form Joyce’s sprawling masterpiece, Ulysses. The combination of these two ideas (real life with Homeric myth) created one of Modernism’s greatest characters, Leopold Bloom, the everyman we can all relate to. The book is moving, entertaining and downright confounding in equal measures; everyday life can sometimes feel like an epic pain in the (insert noun) and we are all in it together, in case you hadn’t noticed.
So, with the alchemy of self (or various selves) combined with that magic ‘second’ element (or a second story, like Homer’s Odyssey) there is potential to make an interesting new story. For The Book of Thunder and Lightning, my inspiration engine was a 2021 walk to a neighbourhood called The Boundary Estate in London’s Shoreditch. The epigraph from the novel sets the scene:
Arnold Circus
In 1889 the demolition teams came.
They levelled The Old Nichol, only leaving fragments of the past behind -
Boundary Passage, Old Nichol Street, Chance Street. Some others.
By 1900, The Boundary Estate was built.
Tall orange-bricked flats sprang up, with shared stairwells
and large windows that let in the light from wide tree-lined avenues.
A round central park, Arnold Circus, was built in the estate’s centre.
It was constructed on a six foot mound
using thousands of bricks from the old torn down houses.
For some reason, the architect had insisted that precisely six trees be planted in a circle.
They remain there to this day.
What followed was a year of historical research that unearthed all sorts of characters that had been lurking in wait behind dormant lumps of grey matter; the main character Tom Baxter, tricked into a life of crime; the nasty old Fence, Theodore Hush; Arthur Snipe, the toxic east end king pin, slithering up the greasy pole of respectability. The only exception was Simon Beaver, resident of the Boundary Estate and hack journalist who becomes an unlikely hero. This was autobiographical (kind of) and his life of buses and private tutoring is very much a part of my day to day existence. But apart from him (or me), all the characters seemed to unfurl from that first visit to that neighbourhood and were a result of that magic formula (unexpected place + real history = new characters).
However, I am cheating (ever so slightly). If I was to point to a third element, it would be A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896), the sad story of a young boy from ‘The Old Nichol’ who gets caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminates in him being killed in a knife fight. This book was my first port of call after I discovered that the Nichol was buried beneath what is now The Boundary Estate, and was without a doubt a massive inspiration. It’s just that, for me, it wasn’t enough to simply re-visit the story of a boy being dragged into a life of crime and leave it at that. My character had to have this additional dimension; he was obsessed with electricity, which surely must have seemed like a type of magic to a working class boy growing up in the 1800s:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C Clarke
So there you have it. My path to creating interesting characters; a good walk to a new place followed by a whole load of historical research, combined with a little bit of electricity...
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
Reference
Morley, David, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Past ghosts and future heroes: the appeal of the Gothic mashup behind The Book of Thunder and Lightning
When creating future heroes for literature, it’s sometimes useful to look to the past. If we dig deeper into history we can see our present realities reflected back to us and this can be furtive ground for writers. This is what happened to me back in 2021, following the completion of my novella Headcase. With the worst of the pandemic behind us, a short walk to a local neighbourhood in Shoreditch, London took me to a street I had never come across before. Calvert Avenue, with its chic boutiques and quaint cafes lead to Arnold Circus, a small round park with a spired bandstand at its centre. Its elevated position gave you a view of the spider web of broad, orange-bricked avenues fanning out from it. Had I suddenly been transported to another city?, another country? Another time perhaps.
After doing a little research (which subsequently turned into a year-long obsession) I discovered that this attractive inner-city neighbourhood had a history that was all its own. The site of The Boundary Estate, built in 1900 was where the Old Nichol once stood. ‘The Nichol’ as it was known was one of the most notorious slums in the 1800s and that raised park I had entered had been built on top of the torn down bricks from its old houses. The poetry of this struck me like a cosh round the head on a foggy night in Limehouse. This was the beginning of my next story, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone.
I descended into the research rabbit hole by first reading A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, the sad story of a young boy from The Nichol getting caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminating in him being killed in a knife fight. Although the book was less famous than Dickens’ Oliver Twist, it caused a stir at the time it was published in 1896. It divided opinion, with some critics saying it glamorised inner-city violence and others saying it exaggerated it. Hang on. This sounds a bit familiar, I thought, as I pressed pause on my remote halfway through an episode of Top Boy Summerhouse. As the cliché goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. One of the book’s main plot themes centres around young boys being used to transport drugs around the country. This element was directly inspired by what is happening now up and down the country today. The idea that there were exploitative practices in Victorian Britain, including forced labour as a form of criminal punishment wasn’t miles away from this, so the idea of adding a fictional idea of a drug factory wasn’t that outlandish.
After that initial burst of research, I returned to the Boundary Estate one mild autumn afternoon. As I sat to have a coffee, I checked my phone and a tragic news story popped up about a boy having been struck by lightning while playing football. I looked back up to the bandstand and again noticed that metal spire poking up to the heavens and then thought of the poor boy in Morrison’s book. Any cynicism I had about fate and coincidence evaporated like white dandelion pods floating up to blue skies. The rest, as they say is history. Well actually that’s not strictly true, because although the first half of The Book of Thunder and Lightning does take place in the past, the second takes place in the 21st Century.
So the moral of this story is, if you want to find out where we are now, it often helps to look at where we came from and if you want some inspiration, it might well be right outside your door (or underneath your feet).
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
After doing a little research (which subsequently turned into a year-long obsession) I discovered that this attractive inner-city neighbourhood had a history that was all its own. The site of The Boundary Estate, built in 1900 was where the Old Nichol once stood. ‘The Nichol’ as it was known was one of the most notorious slums in the 1800s and that raised park I had entered had been built on top of the torn down bricks from its old houses. The poetry of this struck me like a cosh round the head on a foggy night in Limehouse. This was the beginning of my next story, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone.
I descended into the research rabbit hole by first reading A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, the sad story of a young boy from The Nichol getting caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminating in him being killed in a knife fight. Although the book was less famous than Dickens’ Oliver Twist, it caused a stir at the time it was published in 1896. It divided opinion, with some critics saying it glamorised inner-city violence and others saying it exaggerated it. Hang on. This sounds a bit familiar, I thought, as I pressed pause on my remote halfway through an episode of Top Boy Summerhouse. As the cliché goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. One of the book’s main plot themes centres around young boys being used to transport drugs around the country. This element was directly inspired by what is happening now up and down the country today. The idea that there were exploitative practices in Victorian Britain, including forced labour as a form of criminal punishment wasn’t miles away from this, so the idea of adding a fictional idea of a drug factory wasn’t that outlandish.
After that initial burst of research, I returned to the Boundary Estate one mild autumn afternoon. As I sat to have a coffee, I checked my phone and a tragic news story popped up about a boy having been struck by lightning while playing football. I looked back up to the bandstand and again noticed that metal spire poking up to the heavens and then thought of the poor boy in Morrison’s book. Any cynicism I had about fate and coincidence evaporated like white dandelion pods floating up to blue skies. The rest, as they say is history. Well actually that’s not strictly true, because although the first half of The Book of Thunder and Lightning does take place in the past, the second takes place in the 21st Century.
So the moral of this story is, if you want to find out where we are now, it often helps to look at where we came from and if you want some inspiration, it might well be right outside your door (or underneath your feet).
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.
