Sophie Gee

Bleak House, Dickens' Bleak House.

Okay, so now compare and contrast.

The fog had crept into the taxi where it crouched, panting in a traffic jam.

Great sentence.

It oozed ungenially to smear sooty fingers over the two elegant people who sat inside.

They were keeping apart self-consciously, each stealing occasional glances in the same kind of fear as their clasped hands resting between them on the shabby leather seat.

It may only be blackmail, said the man in the taxi, hopefully.

So it's,

You know, there's this real intersection between the great Victorian narratives of sort of the end of empire and what Allingham is doing here with the end of the Second World War.

It's so clever on her part to pick up on that literary landscape as well as the literal landscape to introduce this new turn in detective writing.

I'm having a deep internal debate, John, about whether to shoehorn in one of my favourite subjects, which is John Evelyn's treatise on air pollution, Fumifugium, from the end of the 17th century, in which he alerts readers to the dangers of air pollution.

But...

Perhaps that's enough on that topic.

Although, sorry, actually, no, I can never resist going in hard on my complete tangents.

But when Evelyn writes Fugifugium, he's kind of using this idea of fog and air pollution as a metaphor for the horrors of the Republican period in England, for the period where the king was beheaded and Cromwell and the Republicans were

The Puritan Republicans took over and England no longer had a monarchy.

And he's writing from the restoration in a kind of lament for this pollution that has covered Britain.

And I think actually Allingham is using the fog in a similar spirit to think about the kind of impact of the Second World War.

Even deeper history than Dickens getting into... Can you believe that I brought... We'll be back on demonology in a minute with James I. I think that's why we've got a winning product, Sophie.

A character.