On a mild autumn afternoon in 1882, William Trenchard sits smoking his pipe in the garden of his comfortable family home. When the creak of the garden gate heralds the arrival of an unexpected stranger, he is puzzled but not alarmed. He cannot know the destruction this man will wreak on all he holds most dear...

The stranger announces himself as James Norton, but claims he is in reality Sir James Davenall, the man to whom Trenchard's wife Constance had been engaged, and who had committed suicide eleven years ago. Sir Hugo, James's younger brother, and his mother, Lady Catherine, refuse to recognise Norton and force Trenchard - who fears the loss of his wife's affections - into an uneasy alliance against him. But Trenchard must plumb the depths of his own despair before the dark secrets of the Davenall family can finally, shockingly, be revealed…

When asked, as I quite often am, which writers inspired me to start writing myself, I always put Wilkie Collins near the top of the list. The sheer exuberance of his plotting makes his best novels an enduring delight to read.

There’s a powerful sense in which Painting the Darkness is a tribute to Collins’ style of writing, although I gleefully abandoned that irritating custom among Victorian novelists of leaving the exact year in which a story is set unspecified. (‘It was in the year 18—’ and so forth.) We know exactly where and when we are in this book. It begins in London on the first day of October, 1882, and ends on the shore of Lake Lugano, in Switzerland, on the last day of September, 1889.

The inspiration for the plot of Painting the Darkness was the extraordinary real life mid-Victorian mystery-melodrama of the Tichborne Claimant. As is often the case, fact is altogether more bizarre than fiction can afford to be. How Arthur Orton, aka Roger Castro, semi-literate 24-stone butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, was able to convince half of England that he was actually Roger Tichborne, well-bred, high-toned heir to a baronetcy, conveniently (for Orton) missing, presumed drowned, is hard for us to imagine now. The claimant to the Davenall baronetcy in Painting the Darkness has much more going for him, not least the distinct possibility that he may be genuine.

Orton’s pursuit of his claim ended in a fourteen-year prison sentence for perjury. The end of my story is, suffice to say, very different.

Naturally, I’m not the first writer to mine such rich material. Anthony Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? Was published in 1878, only four years after Orton was gaoled. It would have been obvious to Trollope’s readers what had planted the idea for the story in his mind. Sadly, it’s not one of his best books. His heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Maybe he simply wasn’t the right man for the job. Collins could  have done it brilliantly, of course. It’s just a pity he didn’t. Although, for my purposes, it’s rather a blessing. He left a gap I did my best to fill.  

Finally, a word about the title of this book. I’m often asked what it means. Well, all I’ll say is that it’s derived from a line in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater: ‘It was as if I could paint … upon the darkness.’ Collins, an opium user himself - in the form of laudanum, drug of choice for the Victorian middle classes, not to mention Queen Victoria herself - would have known the feeling. I need hardly add that writers of my generation resort to nothing stronger than coffee to get the imaginative juices flowing. Who could ever suppose otherwise?