Novelist ANDREW MARTIN, author of the bestselling thrillers featuring Edwardian railway detective Jim Stringer, goes back to the York of the 1790s for his latest book, which is out next week. Here he explains why...

Having grown up in York, I left in 1981 to go to university. But I have returned many times since, and the city has always haunted my imagination.

In 2002, I began a series of novels featuring the Edwardian railwayman, Jim Stringer. He is based at the railway police office that once stood on the main ‘up’ platform of York station (platform 3, to modern travellers). Much of the action in those books takes place in the vicinity of the York ‘railway lands’, as Jim tangles with ‘station loungers’ or suspicious-looking drinkers in the Railway Institute.

For my new novel, Soot, I have moved back in time – to 1799 – and closer to the heart of the city. This arose because my wife bought me an ebony-framed silhouette painting inscribed, ‘The Reverend James Willoughby 1776, of Long Marsden, York.’ This gave me an idea: what if a silhouette painter was killed by some un-named person whose silhouette he’d painted? The investigation would then be a matter (in effect) of hunting down a shadow, and those shadows would be all the more vivid in the monochrome world of a snowbound city.

Silhouette artists would be found in any Georgian ‘resort’. They would certainly have been in Brighton and Bath, so why not York? I placed my man on Coney Street, not far from the Black Swan (demolished in 1968), where the stagecoaches ‘let out’ for London, with a muffled-up man riding shotgun next to the driver.

Eighteenth Century York suggested a Jane Austen-like elegance to me but also the Wild West. Anyone who was anyone in York danced at the weekly balls held in the Assembly Rooms (now hosting ‘ASK Italian’ restaurant), but there was also gambling in the undercroft, where the tables were patrolled by men carrying pistols.

I researched Georgian York by reading back numbers of that ancestor of the The Press, The York Courant, the front page of which was largely given over to classified advertisements of horses or farms for sale. The Courant was also very concerned with the phases of the moon. Some classifieds unrelated to the natural world caught my eye. For example: ‘LOST (about six weeks since) a small paper parcel containing a MINIATURE PICTURE, also a gold locket with hair…’

In Janette Ray’s art bookshop on Bootham, I bought a book on pigments, from which I learned that silhouette painters made very dark blacks from burning cherry or peach stones, or they simply used soot…hence my title. I got the name of my principal character, the impoverished son of a country squire, from a list of inmates of the debtors’ prison in York Castle: Fletcher Rigge. After talking to the very helpful staffs of the Castle Museum, and the Borthwick Institute for Archives, I contrived a scenario whereby my Fletcher Rigge is released from the gaol on bail paid by the son of the murdered painter: he has a month in which to find the culprit. If Rigge succeeds, the balance of his debt will be paid off. If he fails, he will be returned to prison, possibly for the rest of his life. Thus I got round the problem of there being no police – still less any detectives – in York in 1799.

The son of the murdered painter is called Captain Harvey, and he is apparently a disreputable character. Where might he live? In a book called Regency York by Florence Bebb, I read about the three dangerous streets that used to lead from Castlegate to the river: First Water Lane, Second Water Lane, and Far Water Lane. Bebb writes, ‘Despite its seedy, run-down character, First Water Lane contained some ancient houses of decayed beauty.’ I installed Captain Harvey in one of those.

I have tried to give the reader a total immersion in the wintry York of 1799: the river frozen over; the smell of cinnamon and oranges in the punch served at the Assembly; long candles burning overnight in the shop windows; watchmen patrolling the streets and blithely crying, ‘It’s midnight and all’s well!’ regardless – very often – of the true situation.

BLOB ‘Soot’ by Andrew Martin is published by Corsair on July 6. Andrew will be speaking at York Waterstones on July 12 at 7pm.