Candlelight Reading...: How custard inspired historical fiction author, M J Porter! HistoricalFiction #HistoricalMystery #TheCustardCorpses #BlogTour #CoffeePotBookClub @coloursofunison @maryanneyarde

The Custard Corpses
By M J Porter

A delicious 1940s mystery.

Birmingham, England, 1943.

While the whine of the air raid sirens might no longer be rousing him from bed every night, a two-decade-old unsolved murder case will ensure that Chief Inspector Mason of Erdington Police Station is about to suffer more sleepless nights.

Young Robert McFarlane’s body was found outside the local church hall on 30th September 1923. But, his cause of death was drowning, and he’d been missing for three days before his body was found. No one was ever arrested for the crime. No answers could ever be given to the grieving family. The unsolved case has haunted Mason ever since.

But, the chance discovery of another victim, with worrying parallels, sets Mason, and his constable, O’Rourke, on a journey that will take them back over twenty-five years, the chance to finally solve the case, while all around them the uncertainty of war continues, impossible to ignore.

Publication Date: March 25th 2021

Publisher: M J Publishing

Genre: Historical Mystery

How custard inspired historical fiction author,

M J Porter.

Thank you for welcoming me to your blog.

The inspiration behind The Custard Corpses is a bit weird, even I admit that.

My father has, for many years, bought and sold antique paraphernalia, mostly maps, but also other items as well – books, stamps, old vellum deeds, postcards – you get the idea. With the restrictions last year, he wasn’t able to sell as normal at his antique fairs, and having put off having an online presence, he finally decided to open an eBay shop – but needed tech support. And so, as tech support, he started sending me all sorts of fascinating items to list, but the one that really got me were the advertisements that ran in the Picture Post magazines for Birds Custard.

(Image provided by MJ Porter).

They’re bright, they’re inviting, they are, to put it bluntly, before their time. They have lovely catchphrases, such as ‘every little helps’ which Tesco use now. The black and white images on the coloured background ensure the readers eye is drawn to the happy child, and they do make you want to eat custard. I wanted to share them with as many people as possible so that they could catch a glimpse of these old campaigns. There were other advertisements as well in the magazines, ones for Pepsi and for Shell, to name a few, but it was the Birds Custard ones that really captured my imagination. But how could I share them with people?

Well, my mind words in strange ways, and I began to consider a mystery that would somehow be relevant to the advertisements, so it needed to be set during the period the Picture Post magazine was produced from 1938 to the 1950s. And so, The Custard Corpses.

I set The Custard Corpses during the Second World War, but that was really because it fit with the adverts I’d seen, the added bonus that I could then use the well-known events of the war was a secondary consideration.

Where I set the book was entirely based on the fact that I had family members who’d lived in Erdington at the time. I was able to pick the brains of my Dad for the little details that I didn’t know or couldn’t remember, not that he was born in 1943, but not long after.

It was all quite random, in the end, and there was a swell of little details that I uncovered that just, through pure happenstance, fitted together. It helped that I wanted to try my hand at something more modern than the eleventh century, but still historical. But I’m not an expert on any other time period, so I suppose it was an easy choice to decide on a setting that was just within living memory of some. I couldn’t visit anywhere due to Lockdown, so familiar was best.

Is this the weirdest reason to have written a book?

You can purchase your copy of The Custard Corpses at your favourite bookstore, here.

M J Porter