Thomas Morris
The author of historical true crime talks to Lynne Hackles about how he puts the hours in
Thomas Morris is a writer and historian. His first book, a critically-acclaimed history of cardiac surgery, The Matter of the Heart (Bodley Head, 2017), won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for non-fiction. He is also the author of the intriguingly titled The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth (Bantam, 2018) and his new book is The Dublin Railway Murder. For eighteen years, Thomas was a BBC radio producer. His freelance journalism has appeared in publications including The Times, The Lancet and the TLS.
‘Since leaving the BBC in 2015 I have been writing full time,’ he says. ‘I do some book reviewing and other bits and pieces of freelance journalism, but most of my time is spent working on my own books.
‘My wife is an anaesthetist so is usually up at the crack of dawn. When she leaves for work at 6am I go for a long walk in a lovely local pocket of countryside that has somehow avoided being built on, despite being inside the M25. It’s both exercise and relaxation: I look out for wildlife and listen to radio programmes, but almost never think about work before breakfast. I’m usually at my desk by 9am, with a fresh cafetiere of coffee. After that I work straight through till 6pm, with a break for lunch – though there are many sources of potential distraction: what’s going on in the cricket, YouTube, writing my (medical history) blog, and too many games of online chess. I find a good rule of thumb is always to be at work when my wife is, and then when she has a day off so can I. It’s usually blissfully quiet at home but at the moment there are builders making a lot of noise nearby, so I’ve taken to listening to music through headphones while I work (always classical, instrumental, and nothing good enough to distract me.)
‘The idea for The Dublin Railway Murder started when I found by chance in a Victorian medical journal a short article about the case. It turned out that the trial of the prime suspect had been published as a book, and when I read the transcript I was fascinated. After a bit more digging around in newspaper archives and the British Library there were so many strange and unexpected aspects to the story that I was desperate to write about it.
‘The Dublin Railway Murder is a true-crime thriller set in Victorian Ireland, a reconstruction of the events that followed a notorious and perplexing murder at a Dublin railway station in 1856. The book follows the detectives investigating the crime, the eventual murder trial, and a rather strange epilogue involving a phrenologist – a man who believed that he could identify a murderer just from the shape of their head.
‘It took slightly more than a year to research and write it. I made a couple of visits to libraries, but the vast majority of the research was done online, from home. There wasn’t much alternative, since most of the book was written while we were living in Canada, in lockdown. But there’s such an amazing amount of historical material digitised these days that it didn’t really make any difference. Luckily, I was able to make the one absolutely essential research trip, to Dublin, before Covid made travel impossible.
‘I visited the Irish national archives more in hope than expectation, because it was quite possible that nothing relating to this murder case had been preserved. So it was a pretty thrilling moment to be presented with a bulging cardboard folder of letters, interview transcripts and memos written by the detectives and other officials during the original murder inquiry.
‘A single day in the archives was enough to gather all I needed. But I got a lot more out of my visit to Dublin, just walking the streets, visiting the various buildings mentioned in the book and walking in the footsteps of the principal characters in the story.
‘There was a huge amount of information about the case already available from other sources, so the book would have been written even without it. But what the archive material added was amazing detail about what was happening behind closed doors, away from the newspaper reporters – and entire private conversations, recorded word for word.
‘Now I am working on another historical true crime book, this time set in Georgian London.’
Website: www.thomas-morris.uk