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Back The Dazzle of the Light Save as PDF
Chapters (55)
  1. Praise for Georgina Clarke
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  51. Historical Note
  52. Acknowledgements
  53. Also by Georgina Clarke
  54. About the Author
  55. Copyright

The Forties were glamorous and ruthless, and caught the attention of reporters whenever they appeared in court, dressed up to the nines. The gang was always led by a ‘queen’, and the most famous of these leaders was Alice Diamond, who provided the inspiration for my Queen of the Thieves, Annie Richmond. Many of the crimes and schemes in this novel are based on the Forties’s real-life activities. Later in the 1920s, they became known as the Forty Elephants – possibly a hint at their association with the south London Elephant and Castle gang, or maybe a reference to how they looked when they padded the insides of their clothes with stolen goods.

If you want to learn more about the Forty Thieves/Elephants, then a good place to start is Brian McDonald’s Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: Britain’s First Female Crime Syndicate.

Debenham and Freebody sadly no longer exists (Debenhams was liquidated in May 2021, as I was submitting this novel). Whiteleys was a store in Bayswater. Selfridges still rules Oxford Street. Hartleys, the store on Kensington High Street where Ruby first makes her appearance, is entirely my own creation.

If you would like to know more about early twentieth-century department stores, then look at Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge by Lindy Woodhead.

The Kensington Gazette also emerged from my imagination, but in this period, there were many small-scale local newspapers offering regular – even daily – news. You can find out more in Kevin Williams’s Read All About It!: A History of the British Newspaper.

The Angel nightclub is loosely inspired by the 43 Club on Gerrard Street, run by the infamous Kate Meyrick. In 1920, Meyrick was running Dalton’s, in Leicester Square, mentioned in this novel by some of Ruby’s colleagues. Later that same year, the 43 opened. See Judith R. Walkowitz’s Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London.

The cocktail Harriet drinks in the novel – the White Lady – was allegedly invented by real-life Savoy bartender Harry Craddock in 1920 when he joined the hotel. When the American Bar was refurbished in 1927, he buried the ingredients in a cocktail shaker in the walls: 2 parts gin, 1 part Cointreau, 1 part lemon juice, shaken over ice and strained. Enjoy.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my editor, Jenna Gordon, and the whole team at VERVE Books, not only for loving this novel from the start, but for working with such care and attention to bring it to publication. It has been a joy to work with an editor who understood the characters as well as I did, and a team so committed to making the novel come alive.

Thank you to Elsa Mathern for capturing the essence of the book so beautifully and dynamically with this cover.

As always, I am grateful to my agent, Laura Macdougall at United Agents, who juggled my writerly hopes and dreams alongside a new baby – hello, Thea! – and to Olivia Davies, also of United Agents, whose initial prompt led to this book.