A Mortal Malice

"This book is now out of print. It dates from the early 1960s. Hilda Lewis is my third favourite novelist of all time (you’ve got the other two in the list). She wrote a wonderful series of historical novels. This one is based on the famous poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London, in the early 17th century. It has a rich cast of rogues and royal characters at the Jacobean court. It’s a tour de force, and you could actually rely on it as history. They just don’t write them like that now. It’s a page-turner that has everything – witchcraft, sex, scandal and murder. Incredibly so. I do feel quite strongly about that. I think that historical novels should be written with integrity. Even if the author is taking dramatic licence, it’s got to be credible in the context of what is known about the subject. As a historian, I quickly abandon historical novels if I realise that whoever wrote them hasn’t done very much homework. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She was a great British novelist. She didn’t just write historical fiction, she wrote modern novels, including a book based on the Dr Crippen case, right from the 1940s until her death in the 1970s. One or two of them were filmed. The film Mandy was based on her book The Day is Ours , about a deaf and dumb child growing up in London in the early 1950s. It’s searing. All three of these novelists – Lofts, Seton and Lewis – have an incredible grasp of character, and I know that Nora Lofts has been the subject of a recent university thesis, because there is a growing body of opinion that her work has been underrated. It’s an epic tale. And it wasn’t the only one of its kind. Lofts wrote another called Bless This House , in a single volume, which was about an Elizabethan house through the centuries, and that was later followed by A Wayside Tavern , about the history of an inn, from Roman times to the present day. I have all 63 of her books, and nearly all of Hilda Lewis’s. I am still trying to track them down, as some are pretty rare."