Murder by family tree

The idea for The Blood Detective, and much of the research for the book, came as a direct result of tracing my own family tree. My son had just been born and I remember being proud that this meant the Waddell name would live on and I wouldn’t be the last of the line.

Then I thought, ‘What line?’ I had no idea about my roots. Or where this name I was so irrationally proud of came from. I asked my Dad and he had no idea either, other than a vague inkling there was a commingling of Scottish and Irish blood. So I went to the Family Records Centre in Islington, now sadly closed, and started the search.

The thrill of being the first to trace my family’s roots was undeniable, like treading virgin snow. I’m a reformed tabloid hack, so when I discovered a long-hidden family secret within an hour of starting my research – the revelation that my grandmother, a devout Catholic, married my grandfather when she was five months pregnant - I was hooked. Rifling through documents, checking and referencing, compiling information and sifting through the details for clues - family history is as close to detective work as many of us will ever get.

I remember looking at the death certificate of my great-grandfather – who died of kidney cancer and not, as family legend had it, been crushed to death in the water wheels of a maltings – and for the first time feeling a connection to the past, rather it being something distant and far removed. Looking at how these people lived and died, paradoxically, made them breathe. After a hard day’s research, I started to think about what the lives of our ancestors told us about ourselves, and how we got to be where we are. I wondered how many secrets and scandals lay buried and long forgotten in the archives FRC, the National Archives and the other places I’d visited to flesh out my family’s story.

That evening I was in the pub, a few pints of bitter to the worse, when the idea that eventually became the Blood Detective hit me. What if the past didn’t lie down and play nice? What if long-buried grisly secrets eventually seeped to the surface? Death certificates seemed the ideal place to start. Thankfully I had the sense to text the idea to myself so the idea wasn’t obliterated by the booze. Unlike most drunken ideas it still seemed a good one the next morning. You won’t hear me condemning the ubiquity of mobile phones…

Around this time I was asked by Wall-to-Wall television and BBC books to write the book that accompanied the series Who Do You Think You Are? The brief was to write a book that was as far way as possible from the usually dry, faintly academic texts that already existed as guides to researching your family tree.

The aim was to produce a guide that would help people find out what sort of people their ancestors were, how they lived and loved, to help them understand their past rather than merely seeking to track down an elusive Uncle and produce an ornate family tree.

Writing the WDTYTA book doubled up as research for the novel. I got to know what records were available, where they were kept, how they could be tracked down. The sheer wealth of information is mind-boggling. By the time the guide was in the shops and selling well I had enough genealogical knowledge to flesh out the story.

I’m the sort of writer who targets his research as he goes along – when I know there’s something I need to know, I go and find it out, which means I’ve taken several trips to the National Archives. Whenever I needed more detail, I was lucky enough to call on the expertise of Nick Barratt, a professional genealogist and historian who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of sources and material.

Back to The Blood Detective here.

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