Horsham author Mark Ramey debuts with a 1914 mystery novel where one detective hunts for the truth

Summer 1914. A London-based private detective, Sergeant Dagger, is employed by Celia Harrison, a suffragette, to discover why her husband, an army Captain, has committed suicide. Unconvinced by the official verdict of melancholia, Celia wants the truth - as do MI5, who also recruit Dagger.

As WWI breaks out, Dagger reluctantly joins the British Expeditionary Force, and sails to France with the first battalions. There he uncovers a web of deceit and hypocrisy lying at the heart of the British Army.

Operating along the fast-moving front-line, Dagger sees the death of the first British soldier, flies with the Royal Flying Corp into occupied Belgium and fights at the Battles of Le Cateau and the Aisne.

Later, reassigned to libertine Paris, Dagger, an amateur artist and poet, meets modernist icons Picasso, Cocteau and Apollinaire before discovering the identity of a mysterious painter called Fevert and helping MI5 solve one last problem.

Mark Ramey is a father of two and husband of one, who lives in West Sussex and teaches Film at a sixth form college. A Philosophy graduate with a taste for Nietzsche, art history and poetry, Dagger is his first published novel.

Mark explains: “This novel is set in 1914, although its action ranges from Whitechapel in 1888 to Paris in 1915. One third of the book takes place in Northern France during the first battles of WW1 and this is where another motivating factor can be found: I wanted to solve the puzzle surrounding the death of Private Parr, the first British combat fatality of WW1. This led me to speculate on the relationship of the two leading commanders of the BEF (The British Expeditionary Force – the army sent overseas to fight the Germans in 1914). These men, Field Marshal Sir John French and General Smith-Dorrien hated each other and were both eventually replaced in 1915.”

He continues: “I have always enjoyed historical detective fiction and so part of my motivation to write an historical novel was purely selfish – I wanted to research the late Edwardian and early Georgian period. This period I discovered parallels, in many ways, our own: modern and dynamic, fast-moving, violent, expressive, radical, shocking. It is also artistically the era of modernism and I wanted to meet some of the great artists and writers of that period. For example, Dagger, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, finds himself in Paris at one point in the narrative, meeting Picasso, Apollinaire, and Jean Cocteau. Earlier in the book Dagger also interviews the British poet, Rupert Brooke. Dagger is a frustrated artist and becomes something of a specialist in dealing with artist’s crimes – the next planned volume of his work will explore his relationship with the Dadaists of Paris, Berlin, and Zurich in the early 1920s.”

Find out more at https://www.bookguild.co.uk/bookshop/Dagger-6wfG/