David Morrell

WHY DAVID MORRELL WROTE INSPECTOR OF THE DEAD

For the past several years, I’ve been living in 1850’s London—at least in my imagination. After decades of writing about contemporary subjects, I became so disenchanted with the modern world that I retreated to the Victorian era and immersed myself in it, hoping to persuade readers that they are literally on the fascinating, fogbound streets of that time.

Inspector of the Dead is a mystery/thriller set against the historical background of the seven men who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria. It features Thomas De Quincey (from Murder as a Fine Art), one of the most infamous and brilliant literary personalities of that era. Reacting to cavernous nightmares that he described in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey anticipates the theories of Freud by more than half a century and uses those theories to track down the man who would topple the British Empire.