"Rusted Souls"

Chris Nickson is the author of eleven Tom Harper mysteries, eight highly acclaimed novels in the Richard Nottingham series, and five Simon Westow mysteries. He is also a well-known music journalist. He lives in his beloved Leeds.

Nickson applied the Page 69 Test to Rusted Souls, the final book in the Tom Harper series, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Rusted Souls finds the end of one scene, between Tom Harper and his daughter Mary, who have met for lunch, and what he does afterwards.

While the interaction between Tom and Mary isn’t pivotal to the crime plot, it all becomes part of the change. She lost her fiancé in 1917, in the war, and has been mourning him ever since, dressing black – “widow’s weeds”. Now, 1920, she’s changing. She’s already a successful business owner, running a secretarial agency and school, and she’s going on a tour of the battlefields, organised by a company, to see where everything happened and her fiancé died. She’s bought herself a motor car. In the scene that closes on page 69, she’s unveiling her new wardrobe. More modern, more feminine, not the long Edwardian dresses, but something better for a woman in her 20s and more colourful, in pastels (not a flapper fashion; those hadn’t arrived yet). It’s a shock to her father, who needs to take it in, to accept her change, as he has his own, in the form of retirement. Annabelle, Tom’s wife, Mary’s mother, had seen the new clothes and called her “a right bobby dazzler.” It’s a human interlude, an illustration of the family’s closeness, and Mary now an adult with her own, busy life.

In the second scene Harper is drifting around Leeds city centre, nothing to do for once, and realizing it will soon be that way every day with nothing to occupy his time – although much of it will be taken looking after his ill wife. No chief constable’s car to take him home, and he queues for the tram with everyone else.

They’re scenes of transition and change for both characters, and that sense of change is important for the book. So yes, they serve an important role.

Visit Chris Nickson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Q&A with Chris Nickson.

The Page 69 Test: The Molten City.

The Page 69 Test: Brass Lives.

The Page 69 Test: The Blood Covenant.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Will Rise.

--Marshal Zeringue