For more than two decades, author Will Thomas has taken readers back to Victorian London with his ongoing series featuring private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn. This month, the duo is back in Thomas’ 17th book in the series, “For Services Rendered.”
Thomas, of Broken Arrow, recently celebrated the publication of the novel with an author talk at Magic City Books. A full house of attendees heard behind-the-scenes anecdotes about his latest book in the series, which first began in 2004.
Having originally signed a two-book deal, the success of his debut “Some Danger Involved” had his publisher clamoring for the sequel. In Barker and Llewelyn’s London, it’s a mixture of world history and fiction, so Thomas visited Scotland Yard’s website to examine its timeline of events as a source of inspiration. An entry instantly jumped out to him.
“The first thing I saw was Sun Yat-sen,” Thomas recalled during the event, which I moderated. “I’m interested in Chinese history and stuff like that, so I had found a piece of information that I had no idea had ever happened, and it’s juicy. I knew I had to use it. But I mean that was, like, 20 years ago, and now here it is.”
“For Services Rendered” takes that tidbit and turns it into a full-blown narrative set in 1896. Would-be reformer and revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-Sen turns up in London, running away from China’s Imperial Qing Secret Service, which has placed a substantial bounty on his head for his political activities.
It took Thomas 15 more books to get to that moment in time, since the series runs in chronological order and began in 1884. Thomas worked as a librarian for 22 years before recently retiring. Throughout the years, he took advantage of the access to all sorts of antique books on global history with a major focus on events from the United Kingdom to China.
“I was sucking the library system dry,” said Thomas, who won the 2024 Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for his 14th entry, “Heart of the Nile.” “The interlibrary loan system was just fantastic, and I found some incredibly weird and interesting stuff.”
It took lots of death-dyfing investigations for the martial arts-trained Barker and Llewelyn to finally reach the early days of the Chinese Revolution and work a case involving an important real-life global figure in their fictional London.
“That’s the real fun,” Thomas said. “That’s what I enjoy the most is having my characters interact with people that you know were actually living at that time, and I break all the rules because I have one of my characters date a historical figure. I had another one work with them or talk with them, or you know, have some connection to them.”
He’s long maintained a timeline in his head of when the series will come to a natural close, but its continued success has Thomas reevaluating it.
“Originally I said, ‘I’m going to write 20 books,’ and that was going to be it. But my publisher is just like, ‘OK keep going, keep going, keep going!’” Thomas said. “So now it’s like, I have to actually think beyond 1900.”
Is there a chance his crime fighters could cross the pond to an early 20th-century America?
“You may not know this, but Teddy Roosevelt got a black belt in the White House,” Thomas said. “He studied martial arts in the White House, and nobody knows about it.”
Until just maybe Barker and Llewelyn pay a visit to the Oval Office.
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