Full Moon

"The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our living."

       Philip K. Dick,

       Confessions of a Crap Artist

It has been a long time coming, but I'm finally able to get back to writing. 

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'I returned to the office in high spirits. Ten days well paid work that I might complete in six if it all went well.' Jonathan Prosper believes he's off for a paid holiday in the princely state of Domundi. But it seems that the prime minister of the state has just recently gone up in smoke, and someone else is missing, believed dead. It's springtime in India, 1936, and Jonathan Prosper has to work for his fee.

The Inspiration for the plot of this book developed because of a misapprehension. I was reading every autobiographical book set in India that I could find. Two authors had similar reasons for being in India, both acting as a sort of secretary for a maharajah - E M Forster, The Hills of Devi, and J R Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday. Both writers were gay, Ackerley being fairly open about it, unusual for a book published in the 1950s. I was aware that several other writers who had travelled to India were gay, and I gained the impression that there must have been a gay scene in India for a while. But there seems to have been no overlap in the times that the writers were in India. 
My book has a bit of a gay scene happening, but it based on several books and is quite plausible. The court of Domundi is based on Forster's and Ackerley's accounts.
Portrait painters were in big demand among the maharajahs. I've drawn on the experiences of two authors in particular -  W G Burn Murdoch, From Edinburgh to India & Burma, and Philip Steegman, Indian Ink.
I've drawn on Maharajah by Diwan Jarmandi Dass for some of the more unlikely aspects of the life of the maharajahs. 

Mantel argues that historical novelists have a different responsibility to the truth than historians: readers understand that a novel based on real events featuring real people will deploy creative speculation to fill in the gaps. But she counsels that even novelists should pay heed to the truth in so far as it can be established. “Don’t lie, don’t go against known facts,” she warns. For Mantel, this is important because it improves the story. “The reason you must stick by the truth is that it is better, stranger, stronger, than anything you can make up.” [from an account of Hilary Mantel's Reith lectures.]

Or, more succinctly, from Mark Twain:
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

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Alexandra painting. Delhi 1983

Every prince had his portrait painted