Poppy and Daniel are heading to the pictures this evening. Rudolph Valentino is starring in The Sheik showing at the Electric Cinema, Chelsea, just over the road from Aunt Dot’s house.  Not quite sure what she’ll think of a plotline involving the kidnapping of a young woman who then falls in love with the desert prince. Of course, Poppy does not yet know about Stockholm Syndrome …

We can get all nostalgic about past eras and I’m the first to admit I focus on the glamour of the 1920s. But in The Jazz Files and its sequels I try to also show the darker underbelly of the period. In The Jazz Files there’s the long shadow of WWI, the Spanish Flu, the torture of suffragettes, domestic abuse, the dreadful living conditions of the poor and the forced institutionalisation of women with ‘mental health issues’. In Book 2(to come out in September 2016) there is the displacement of millions of people after the Russian Revolution and the plight of injured and unemployed servicemen in London. In Book 3, which I’ve just started, I’ve come across my first piece of misery: Pea Soup Fog! This lethal mix of mist from the Thames and noxious by-products from coal fires caused the ill-health or death of tens of thousands until the Clean Air Act of 1956 started to reverse it. Click here to see a picture of a policeman at Charing Cross in the early 1920s trying to direct traffic through the ‘pea soup’. Imagine poor Poppy having to live through that!

Blown away by the latest review of The Jazz Files on Day 5 of Poppy’s blog tour. This reviewer has seen things in the book – things I’ve layered deep into the text – that (so far) no other reviewer has seen. I’m delighted! Rather Too Fond of Books

The Yellow Wallpaper which she refers to is a short story by the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gillman who wrote the story in light of her own post natal depression in which a woman imagines someone crawling behind the wallpaper in her convalescent room. It is a powerful story of insanity that could have been prevented if women and their ‘problems’ were treated differently. You can read it for free on the Project Guttenberg website.

… well Darlington, anyway. Check out this 60 second film about Poppy Denby filmed at the Darlington Railway Museum with actress Amber Leigh Irish playing Poppy and author Fiona Veitch Smith as the suffragette. Filmed by: Tony Glover Film & Video. Music: ‘The Black Bottom Stomp’ my Jellie Roll Morten.

I know Book 2 in the Poppy Denby Investigates series is only coming out next year, and Book 3, if the publisher likes it, the year after that, but we authors need to work in advance. In my research for book 3 which may very well be set in New York, I have found this spiffing photograph of a policeman measuring the length of women’s bathing suits in Washington DC in 1922. If Poppy and Delilah go to the beach on their Stateside jaunt this may very well happen to them http://ghostsofdc.org/…/bathing-suit-police-a…/1172/view.jpg

Here are some pics from a film shoot we did for a book trailer for The Jazz Files American launch. I’ll show you the finished film when it’s ready, but for now enjoy these stills of actress Amber Irish playing Poppy Denby as she arrives in London and starts investigating.

Everyone had a flapulous time at the launch party at Waterstones, Newcastle on the 25 September. Here is a taste of it. You might want to view the pics to the accompaniment of the Tiger Rag by the Original Dixieland Jazzband. At the launch it was played by Yussef Nimer and Jimmy Madrell from Middlesbrough, not Dixie

I have been asked why I called the first book in the series The Jazz Files? Some people have thought it’s a book about jazz music – which it isn’t; although jazz music most definitely features and would form part of the soundtrack if it was ever made into a film.

The term ‘jazz’ came from a type of black American music that emerged in the early part of the 20th Century. However, it also became a label for the whole sub-culture birthed from that music.

In the 1920s the term ‘jazz’ was used to describe anything that pushed the boundaries and was associated with popular culture as a whole – hence it became known as the Jazz Age. So yes, there was jazz music, but there was also jazz fashion, jazz hairstyles and jazz journalism. And that’s where, in this book, the term comes in. Jazz Journalism is a defined period in the history of the media that was at its zenith in the immediate post-war period 1919 – 1924. It was the successor of ‘yellow journalism’ and a pre-cursor for what today would be known as tabloid journalism. It was not a type of journalism that simply reported on jazz music.

In some quarters ‘tabloid journalism’ is synonymous with sleaze, but originally it was a form of journalism that sought to provide news and entertainment for the masses. It was marked by an interest in society and entertainment but also social activism. This duality is represented by The Daily Globe and Poppy has to walk the tight-rope between these two worlds and the moral dilemmas they present.

The term ‘Jazz Files’ is a made-up phrase. In the novel it is used to describe files kept by The Globe on celebrity gossip. Background information and interesting tit-bits are filed away for reference purposes for future stories. So in the Poppy Denby Investigates books whenever Poppy or one of the other journalists wants some background information on a story they are working on they ask the archivist, Ivan Molanov, to dig out the Jazz Files on so-and-so. The files are labelled for example “JF: E.Dorchester”. Which stands for Jazz File on Elizabeth Dorchester.

As editor Rollo Rolandson explains:

“It stands for Jazz Files,” said Rollo.“It’s what we call any story that has a whiff of high society scandal but can’t yet be proven… you never know when a skeleton in the closet might prove useful.”

Now if you want to know what’s in the Jazz File on Elizabeth Dorchester, you’ll have to read the book!

Fiona had a flapulous time (to quote a friend) at a publicity shoot. With only three weeks to go until publication, she thought she’d get into costume and into character. She made the dress (from an original 1920s pattern designed by a Mrs Depew) and borrowed the car, a beautiful 1928 Ford Pheaton owned by the very generous Alan and Christine Simpson of Crawcrook.