Serendipity (noun) the fact of finding valuable, interesting or pleasing things by chance.
My new book, The Midnight Man, is being published by Hobeck Books on 30 April, but its genesis was in 2022, and thereby hangs a serendipitous tale.
I was in southern Spain, where I go sometimes to write, when an invitation to a surprise birthday celebration landed in my inbox. It was a friend’s seventieth birthday and her partner’s sister had decided to host an impromptu gathering, with an enormous cake, one day hence. I was invited.
I responded to say that I was happy to attend, but then promptly flew into a panic. I had nothing to give her as a present and no birthday card (birthday cards aren’t exchanged in Spain so aren’t readily available to buy). What could I do? As I saw it, I had three choices. I could go out and buy a bottle of something (which would probably be well received, but was a bit boring). I could give her something of my own (with the risk that she might recognize it). Or I could come up with something original (easier said than done). In the end, I decided, as I sat in front of my laptop, manuscript before me, to name two characters for her and her partner in the story I was writing. I told my friend this in an art card and handed it to her at the party (which was a great success). She was delighted.
Fast forward to almost eighteen months later and the manuscript has been submitted to my publisher. The story of the unlikely sleuths from the South London Hospital for Women & Children in pursuit of The Midnight Man is closer to publication. There is, however, still opportunity to make changes and I send my Spanish friend an electronic copy of it to read, just in case she would rather that her name and that of her partner not be used in the book. After all, they might not like it.
I needn’t have worried. They both loved it.
There is, however, an unlooked-for sequel to this. A couple of days after they responded I received another email message from my friend, with an attachment. The document attached was a birth certificate, dated 1974, belonging to my friend’s first-born son. Place of birth was shown as the South London Hospital for Women & Children. My friend, let’s call her Susan (not her real name), had given birth, some fifty years ago in the very hospital where I had set my novel.
The South London Hospital for Women & Children no longer exists, although its buildings still stand, converted into apartments above a supermarket, its award-winning gardens now asphalted over as the car park. It was founded by two remarkable women surgeons, Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley, with the support of many others, in 1913. It was a hospital where women treated women, a ‘woman only’ institution, from head surgeon to lowly porter, on Clapham Common South Side until 1985. One of its patients was my friend and I had never known.
Even stranger, Susan was now both a fictional character in a fictional version of the ‘South London’ as well as having been a real patient at the real hospital fifty years before. A remarkable case of serendipity.
About The Midnight Man
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue – The Midnight Man.
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About Julie Anderson
Julie Anderson is the CWA Dagger listed author of three Whitehall thrillers and a short series of historical adventure stories for young adults. Before becoming a crime fiction writer, she was a senior civil servant, working across a variety of departments and agencies, including the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Unlike her protagonists, however, she doesn’t know where the bodies are buried.
She writes crime fiction reviews for Time and Leisure Magazine and is a co-founder and Trustee of the Clapham Book Festival. She lives in south London where her latest crime fiction series is set, returning to her first love of writing historical fiction with The Midnight Man, to be published by Hobeck.
Follow Julie Anderson on her website or Instagram.
