When I started working on The Tainted I had planned to write a novel based on 1920 Mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India. I decided to fictionalise the regiment so I could have artistic licence and my story was to be an account of how an Irish regiment serving in the British army in the Raj - I called them the Kildare Rangers - mutinied, and how their actions, in those few weeks, panned out. I was barely into writing the first three chapters when I realised that apart from the circumstances of the mutiny, there was a whole different, and indeed far more complex story waiting to be told, one that needed to be told - the aftermath of the mutiny and its ramifications on multiple generations of families in two countries on two separate continents. All three groups of characters in my novel are tainted by association and trauma that has come down through generations and it’s this baggage, and their search for identity and a final sense of belonging that has formed the basis of my book.
Researching this book took up many years of my life! I made a decision fairly early on in the project, to completely immerse myself in the period: so I confined all of my reading to books, magazines, periodicals in the years from about 1910 up to 1947. I watched scores of movies, Hollywood and Bollywood set in the Indian sub continent and Ireland too, that spanned those years. Two films come to mind straightaway: Bhowani Junction starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, and the evocative and poignant Bow Barracks Forever. If you liked The Tainted, I think these two movies will resonate too.
I reconnected with books from my teenage and early twenties reading Somerset Maugham, John Masters and Ruskin Bond amongst many, many others. For an Irish perspective some of the writers I read were Sebastian Barry, JG Farrell, William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien. Happily, I also discovered Barbara Cleverly and her detective stories set in India during the Raj.