Christine asked B.K. Duncan:

I'm interested you didn't mention F. Scott Fitzgerald among your influences. I associate him with the 1920s, although the worlds of The Great Gatsby and Foul Trade are very different. There are glimmers in FT of another, more glamorous life, that somehow evades May. Was class still a big issue in the UK in the 20s? Was the war not a great leveler? Would May's life have been easier had she lived in the US?

B.K. Duncan I've always loved and frequently re-read Fitzgerald but his style, use of language, and treatment of subject matter would be entirely alien to, and inappropriate for, the atmosphere I was trying to create in Foul Trade. A few years ago I wrote Dance of Millions, a book about rum-racketeers on Cuba in 1923, and then I did immerse myself in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser and other American writers. Horses for courses really. It's not about adopting another author's voice but trying to see their worlds through their eyes. The writers adding an interpretation of their social climate to their fiction that helps get a feel for what was important to the real people of the day.

Yes, poor May; she can only ever dream of being the original owner of a pair of lilac dance shows, can't she? Class was a huge issue. Always was in Britain, and I suspect always will be (although we disguise it so much better now and settle for making sly distinctions between people who shop in Tesco and those who glide the aisles of Waitrose). Whatever you see on TV costume dramas, the only leveller of the Great War was that everyone was damaged by it in some way -- even those rich enough to escape to one of the few untouched areas of the world might still have lost someone dear in the conflict. Gulfs widened in fact. Many of the already wealthy amassed more through making and selling arms whilst the poor continued to get poorer; the mass employment that resulted in the General Strike of 1926 started in the early 20s.

Would May's life had been easier if she'd lived in the US? As I created her, probably. But as I'd then have wanted to explore different manifestations of social oppression I would undoubtedly have made her black and subject to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow laws. Fiction is fashioned in the crucible of conflict and adversity, just as that's often what we need to bring the best out of ourselves. Or perhaps I'm just perverse and want to punish the characters who inhabit my head and keep me up at nights. . .

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