Monsters at the Bottom of the Gardens, by Carola Dunn
The setting of my new book, The Corpse at the
Crystal Palace (23rd in the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series) was once for many
years a prominent London landmark. Built in 1851, entirely of glass and steel,
for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, it was disassembled a year later and
rebuilt on a hill in South London. Its demise in 1936 in a huge fire was by all
accounts spectacular. If you go there today there is nothing to see but the
foundation.
Except, that is, the monsters at the southwest
corner of the extensive gardens.
The monsters are the creation of Benjamin Waterhouse
Hawkins. A naturalist and sculptor, he was commissioned by the Crystal Palace
Company to create lifesize statues of some of the prehistoric beasts whose
bones were then being dug up and studied in ever increasing numbers. He went to
Richard Owen, the great scientist, for the latest theories of what they might
have looked like when alive.
Hawkins built in concrete on a massive scale, to
match the huge Palace. He and Owen gave a dinner party inside a partial mould
prepared for the sculpture of an Iguanodon!
In my book, my sleuth, Daisy Dalrymple, takes her
family to the Crystal Palace, including the three-year-old twins, their nanny,
and a couple of young cousins visiting London from their home in the
country. The younger boy, Charlie, is
eager to see the “monsters,” but Daisy's stepdaughter and the older boy, Ben,
insist on seeing some of the indoor exhibits first. These consisted of vast displays
of the history and products of all the world (especially the British Empire),
interspersed with fountains, trees, and over-lifesize sculptures, including an
Egyptian temple on a scale even larger than Hawkins' monsters.
The children explore on their own. They're heading
for the appointed rendezvous when they notice the twins' nanny hurrying along a
deserted passage, apparently following another nanny. Intrigued, they set out
in covert pursuit. Out of the building they trail the pair and across the park.
The nannies disappear round a corner. Suddenly Charlie cries out in excitement:
he's spotted a huge, shaggy head.
The others hurriedly shush him. They tiptoe round a
bend and find Nanny lying unconscious in a pool in the midst of a horde of
monsters.
(Meanwhile, hunting for her children's nurse, Daisy
has found a third nanny dead in the ladies' loo...}
This is a good example of how an apparently
irrelevant snippet of research can lead to an unexpected plot direction. Having
read about the beastly sculptures, I went to see them. Though they differ in
many ways from the theories of paleontogists today, they remain an impressive
spectacle, and I knew at once I must fit them into my story if possible. Up
till then, I hadn't made up my mind how to continue after Daisy's horrid
discovery. The need to get the children to the monsters brought about what you
might call the nanny chase, and all that followed from it.
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BIO
Carola Dunn is the author
of 23 Daisy Dalrymple mysteries, set in England in the 1920s, 4 Cornish
mysteries, and 32 Regencies. Born and brought up in England, she set off around
the world after university and ended up in the US, where she has lived for many
years, presently in Oregon. She has one son and two grandchildren, and a dog,
Trillian, with whom she walks every morning by the Willamette River.
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