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4th October 2020
09:20am BST
Stuart told Her how, after the publication of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, he had been determined to write something that felt "completely different".
"[I wanted to do it] for my own sanity, but also so readers couldn't put me in a box and say, that's what he does," he noted, as he recalled how he first started to develop the idea for The Devil and the Dark Water.
When he was 23-years-old and backpacking through Australia, he ended up in Perth and paid a visit to the Maritime Museum.
"There's a real life historical ship in that museum, it's called the Batavia. It's one of the most horrific stories that you'll ever hear -- but within it are these amazing stories, these really heroic stories," he said.
"There was a soldier, and that's who Arent Hayes is based on. He led a resistance and he fought running battles against the psychopaths and his men; he tried to save as many people as he could. The captain on this incredible voyage -- all he had was a rowboat, his ship had been wrecked, and he and his senior officers had to navigate back to Batavia. They managed to remember to where the island was and bring back help.
"I wanted that as a core, it seemed like such a good idea for the story. Ships are so incredibly atmospheric and I am fascinated by this, the golden age of sail, and especially the courage of people to go into these floating wooden cities without any form of rudimentary navigation, and then just sell for eight months somewhere and just trust that they get there. It's incredible to me."
And while the idea felt "really rich", he didn't want to write the real-life story as it was "too brutal and too sad".
"I wanted a big, fun adventure story. I wanted a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery on board the ship," Stuart continued.
"And, with Seven Deaths, I purposely wrote a bunch of horrible people just as vile as I possibly could -- I stuck them all in a house together to see what happened. And that was the point of that novel, but you've never want to hang out with any of them. But with Devil and the Dark Water, I wanted you to feel like you could hang out with these characters; I wanted to write a bunch of people who were fundamentally nice. They all have secrets, and they're all up to something -- and there's baddies on board, of course -- but everyone does have a viewpoint, and everyone does have a sense of humour in this book."
The author also explained why he decided to flip the usual kind of detective pairing on its head -- and why he wasn't able to "get on board" with Sherlock Holmes.
"Sherlock Holmes is just such a tool. I read all the Sherlock Holmes books back-to-back -- [while] I love Agatha Christie, I had a trickier relationship with [Holmes]. I love the stories, I love the adventurous feel of them. But I'd read loads of books where, you know, Poirot or Marple sits down and pulls it out. In Sherlock Holmes, he's always dashing off to do things -- he's just putting on disguises and waving guns around and stuff. As a teenage boy, that was brilliant. I loved all that stuff. But I couldn't get a handle on Holmes because he is a tool all the way through those stories," Stuart said.
"And there's weird things that happen. So, like, Watson [Holmes' sidekick] is a doctor; he's just come back from war; he's a hero. But everyone treats him like he's an absolute no-nothing cowardly buffoon. And then you've got Lestrade, who is the chief of the world's foremost policing unit at that period -- and again, he couldn't find a cat up a tree. I know it's sort of a fantasy world, but it always bugged me. [Sherlock] was kind of intellectually greedy, he only solved the cases that interested him on an intellectual level. He wasn't there to help people, he didn't have - for me - a sense of compassion or empathy. I could never get on board with him."
He explained that when he started work on The Devil and the Dark Water, "it felt very natural" to have it as a Sherlock Holmes-style adventure structure, mixed with a seafaring novel.
And it was even more of a natural choice to have Arent, Pipps' sidekick, and Sara Wessel, the Governor General's wife, be the crime-solving sleuths.
"I did want to make a character that I could get invested in, and maybe fix the things I didn't like about the Sherlock Holmes stories because I have that privilege now in my own novels. I do love sidekicks. I love sidekicks in everything, [like] stories where they get promoted into the spotlight," he told us.
"And Sara, the Governor General's wife, in the book, as she says, she's basically the least important person in her own story. I wanted to push her into the spotlight. I wanted [Arent and Sara] to be their own detective duo in a way, I wanted them to feel like they had their own roles but were equally important in it."
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