"The Time Machine” meets “Jack the Ripper” in a gripping tale of dark intrigue in Victorian era Edinburgh. This was Whitney's impression of the first part of
Steamy Nights - originally published as
Machinations and now the first part of the
Steamy Nights "montage" released at Changeling Press last Friday.
I like this description - and not just because it was a lovely five angel review at Fallen Angels :). No one objects to being compared to classics like H.G Wells's
The Time Machine, and there are certainly parallels: Caratacus, who hails from a different dimension, is building a machine to take him home; and my characters do end up hopping through time quite a lot!
As for the poor prostitutes who vanish from Edinburgh's dark, foggy streets at the beginning of my story, they are obviouslsy reminiscent of the Jack the Ripper murders in London.
However, although Jack the Ripper was somewhere at the back of my mind, I think Burke and Hare were probably a closer inspiration for me. Who were Burke and Hare, you ask? Well, according to the old song:
Up the close and down the stair, In the house with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox, the man who buys the beef. They were bodysnatchers active in the late 1820s, who sold corpses to Dr Knox of Edinburgh University's prestigeous medical school, for his anatomy lectures. At this time of great medical advances, anatomists were chronically short of bodies to demonstrate with, and it was rumoured that most such lecturers were in league with bodysnatchers, who stole bodies from their graves soon after burial.
Burke and Hare began their enterprise when someone died in Hare's lodging house, inconveniently owing rent. So they sold his body to Dr Knox to pay the debt, and were so delighted with the amount of money they received that they decided not only to go into business but to save themselves the trouble of digging up graves. Instead, they enticed victims to Hare's lodging house, where Burke also lodged, and plied them with alcohol until they could be easily suffocated - thus leaving no marks of violence on the bodies.
They deliberately chose very poor people with no family who were unlikely to be missed - some sixteen in all. However, Dr. Knox's students, who had a suddenly plentiful supply of subjects for dissection, began to recognize some of the corpses, in particular a prostiture called Mary Paterson. And suspicion began to fall on Dr. Knox and his suppliers.
Hare eventually turned King's evidence and "shopped" his partner in crime in return for his freedom. Burke, who seems to have done most of the actual killing, was hanged, and his body, poetically, given over to medical science at the university. Hare is believed to have died a beggar, having been smuggled out of Edinburgh to avoid the angry crowds calling for him to be hanged too.
Dr. Knox was never charged with a crime, but his career was effectively ruined.
Bodysnatching died out as a profession after the Anatomy Act of 1832 legalized the use of unclaimed bodies for dissection. Anatomists could now buy their subjects lawfully from workhouses and hospitals.
Steamy Nights opens in the late 1860's, around forty years after Burke and Hare, but the notorious bodysnatchers were still very much alive in folk memory. Miri and Caratacus walk the same dangerous streets in Edinburgh's old town. However, the women whose disappearance brings them together have not been taken for any purpose as noble as medical science... But to discover that, you'll have to read the book :)
STEAMY NIGHTS By MARIE TREANORAvailable now from Changeling PressLove, lust, and revenge, woven through the twisted chaos of time…
Fighting for her life in Edinburgh's dark, dangerous streets, Miri stabs the wrong man -- and ends up in his arms, sparking a sequence of events that alters history, with catastrophic consequences.
Wrongfully exiled from his own dimension, Caratacus is determined to find a way home. But that's going to be difficult using only nineteenth century steam technology -- even more difficult when distracted by the sort of steam he creates with Miri!
Before he can go home, he has to set things right. That means hunting down a Jack the Ripper copycat, prevent Robert Louis Stevenson from becoming an engineer, and help a brutal, game-playing civilization protect itself from cannibals -- all without destroying the intense but fragile love he's found with Miri.
After that, reversing time should be easy.
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