Sophie Gee

He meets her in the novel Sweet Danger.

There's this strange scene where Campion tries to marry her.

But she's very young.

And so he agrees to wait until she's ready to be his.

And so we kind of hold off for the marriage to take place.

And it's not until the fashion in shrouds where she's 24.

So I think something like my math is quite weak, but I think seven years have passed.

And she is a member of an aeronautics team with the look of a Botticelli angel and Campion, who is 38, and they finally can come together.

So I think she's, you know, this is a kind of riff on the Peter Wimsey story with Harriet Vane.

So we can see that there's a lot of kind of cross-pollination between these writers.

And it makes it all the more pronounced when we get to Tiger in the Smoke that she's doing something really different.

She really is.

So let's have a little flavour of the opening of Tiger in the Smoke.

I'm going to read you a passage, Jonti.

Fog everywhere.

Fog up the river where it flows among green eights and meadows.

Fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city.

Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish Heights, fog creeping into the cabooses of Collier Briggs, fog lying out on the yards, hovering in the rigging of great ships.

That is not Tiger in the Smoke.

What was that the opening of?