Think of England is another exceptional book and I loved it almost as much as her The Magpie Lord series. She keeps coming up with this brilliant, well written stuff that elevates the whole genre. Charles is changing the face of M/M, I'm telling you. I had immense fun with this book I hope you enjoy it! And then I sat back to see how long it would take Daniel to turn Archie's life upside down. Because Archie needed shaking up, I gave him decadent Jewish poet Daniel da Silva to spar with: not English, not white, not a gentleman and very definitely not straight. Think of England features British officer and gentleman Archie Curtis, tackling a dastardly plot in a country house. So I wrote my own Edwardian pulp, my way. I love the balls-to-the-wall plotting and milieu of Edwardian pulp, but the prejudices make it a guilty pleasure. But there's also the almost automatic villainy of queer people and sexually aware women the restrictive class structure the assumed inferiority of non-white and non-British. The fiction of the time is shocking to modern readers with its casual prejudices - in particular the anti-Semitism with which the era is so foully infected. Obviously, if you weren't white, or upper class, or Christian, or male, or straight, it wasn't quite so much fun. John Buchan, Edgar Wallace, E Phillips Oppenheim, and the other wonderful writers of a time when to be a straight white English gentleman was to be at the pinnacle of human civilisation. I love Golden Age pre-WWI Britain, with well-dressed gentlemen and dastardly foreigners, stiff upper lips and country-house parties, derring-do and plots and amateur spies.

Think of England by K.J. Charles