GERARD GILBERT

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I wrote about my experience of self-publishing for the iPaper

I self-published my novel. That doesn’t mean it’s bad

Bill Bryson shouldn’t knock it – it’s a great way to for authors to reach readers, sometimes in their thousands. Full feature (and unflattering headshot) here

 
 

I wrote about An Impression of Murder for our splendid local magazine here in Lewes, Sussex – The Lewesian (taking a local angle obviously, but if you ever get the chance to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry, it’s well worth the four-hour crossing)…

 
An Impression Of Murder
By Gerard Gilbert
 
One of the lesser sung joys of living in Lewes is the ability to trundle 15 minutes down the C7 to Newhaven and catch the ferry to Dieppe – or, even quicker, taking the train to Newhaven Harbour.
I’ve been making the crossing on a regular basis since the early 1990s and have become fascinated by Dieppe’s rich history and its association with Britain, especially in the period between the late 1800s and the Second World War. So much so that I’ve written a novel – a historical crime story – set in the town.
An Impression of Murder takes place in 1897 and what became known locally as “the Oscar Wilde summer”. Wilde, newly released from Reading Gaol, made Dieppe his home for several months, but the story more directly concerns the artist Walter Sickert, who lived and painted in the town. Together he and one of his painting pupils, a fictional art-loving Anglo-French detective called Emile Blanchet, attempt to solve a double murder.
One of the highlights of Dieppe life at the time was the daily arrival of the boat from England, which would dock in the middle of the town – just as the car ferries used to do until the new ferry terminal opened at the turn of the millennium. Impressionist painters, Decadent poets and Conservative politicians (the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had a holiday villa nearby) regularly made the sea journey.
Today there are three crossings a day from Newhaven in summer and two in winter. What is perhaps surprising is that the modern car ferry is no faster than the steam packet ships that made the late Victorian era. Modern stabilised ferries make for a far smoother crossing however, and passengers back then were likely to arrive in Dieppe green around the gills – or not make it at all. In 1887, a boat called the Victoria hit rocks off the coast of France and 19 passengers were tragically drowned.
Even when safely onshore, unwitting passengers faced the indignity of being fined for carrying a box of matches! Match-making was a French government industry at the time and each innocently imported matchstick could incur a penalty of one franc.
My characters are continually toing and froing between Dieppe and Newhaven – a crossing that in reality continued to have a colourful history. Lord Lucan is reputed to have jumped off the back of it and the future Vietnamese liberation leader Ho Chi Minh worked as a pastry cook on it. I’m hoping to write a series of novels featuring my fictional detective, Emile Blanchet, that will conclude with the most famous Dieppe crossing of them all: the Dieppe Raid of 1942. This disastrous dress rehearsal for D-Day cost many British and Canadian soldiers their lives. Needless to say, the by now somewhat elderly Emile will be working covertly with the French Resistance.
An Impression of Murder by Gerard Gilbert is published by New Generation Publishing on 21st November 2024 (£12.99).

A hugely enjoyable book launch and signing for An Impression of Murder at Waterstones in Lewes. The ‘home crowd’ were receptive to the Dieppe setting, many of them having regularly visited the lovely French port.

The act of reading a passage aloud was a salutary lesson in editing – I must do this more often (in fact, all of the time) with my next book.

First, however, was the tricky decision of which passage to read. Being a thriller, I didn’t want to give away any important plot points – ‘spoilers’ as they say in TV-land. At the same time, some of the background material might not have been gripping enough for a short taster. In the event a read a short passage that illustrated Oscar Wilde’s reception after arriving in Dieppe following his release from prison in England.

The English colony in Dieppe were uniformly hostile to Wilde’s presence among them. They would turn their backs on him in the street and walk out of restaurants and cafes when he entered. In fact the only Englishman who didn’t treat Wilde in this fashion was a private detective hired by the great writer’s nemesis, the Marquis of Queensbury. At any rate, that’s what happens in my fictionalised account.