This page is dedicated to news about the progress of and the background to my début novel, which is intended to be the first in a series of crime mysteries featuring Captain Brūno Staprāns, a detective in the Latvian police force of the 1930s.

Why Latvia and why the 1930s?

It will not have escaped readers so far that my name did not originate in the British Isles. Although I was born in the UK (Northamptonshire, to be precise), my parents were Latvians, who came to this country, like many other displaced people of Baltic and Eastern European origin, at the invitation of the Ministry of Labour in 1947, to carry out manual labour. My father worked as an agricultural labourer in Birdingbury, near Rugby, while my mother was employed in the kitchens of the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital on Stoney Stanton Road in Coventry, before becoming an auxiliary nurse. They met, married and moved to Corby in Northamptonshire, where my father got a job in the steel works.

Corby had a burgeoning Latvian community. My father sang in the Latvian male voice choir (Zuikas vīru koris), which remained active well into the 1980s. We spoke Latvian at home and my parents told me many stories about the homeland they had fled to avoid a third brutal foreign occupation in the space of four years. So my links to, and interest in, Latvia have always been strong.

The 1930s were a turbulent decade throughout Europe. The long aftermath of the First World War and the economic shock of the Great Depression tore at the social fabric of nations young and old. Fascist and Communists alike despised democratic systems, fought in the streets and trumpeted their own monolithic new order to replace ‘bourgeois’ or ‘liberal’ democracy in the name of the people. East and south of the Rhine, fragile democracies tumbled one after the other, mutating into dictatorships of varying degrees of brutality. By 1935, Czechoslovakia was the only fully democratic nation east of the Alps.

Latvia’s democracy lasted longer than most. Latvia, which had been part of the Russian Empire since the 18th Century, declared its independence as a united, sovereign nation in November 1918 (while Riga was still under German occupation) and was wholly free of foreign troops by February 1920. Under the Constitution of 1922, there was a largely ceremonial President, elected by the 100 members of the unicameral parliament, the Saeima. Members of the Saeima were elected by the party-list system of proportional representation, but there was no percentage barrier, so it was sufficient for a party or an individual to receive just 1% of the votes cast to be elected. Executive power lay with the Cabinet, presided over by the Prime Minister, who was appointed by the President from a party or parties commanding a majority in the Saeima. The multiplicity of parties led to unstable coalitions. In the period from November 1918 to May 1934, there were as many as 19 governments, some lasting only a few months. Despite this fragility, Latvia made impressive economic and social progress in this time. It could not remain immune from the depression, however. As its export markets collapsed, unemployment grew and demands for a ‘strongman’ president with wide executive powers increased in stridency, especially from the right wing, which had remained in power continuously for all but two years since 1918 with the help of the centre parties.

Then, on the night of 15-16 May 1934, the existing Prime Minister, Kārlis Ulmanis, who had been Latvia’s first Prime Minister, and who was now presiding over his 8th democratically elected government, staged a long-planned bloodless coup d’état with the help of the army and Home Guard auxiliaries. He suspended parliament and banned all political parties, instituting an authoritarian regime, styling himself as Vadonis (the Leader) with a personality cult around his person. Scores of members of parliament (including most Social Democrats and some centrists) were interned in a detention camp and only released many months later. There was a purge of ‘unreliable’ civil servants and local officials. Until the Soviet occupation of June 1940, 15 May was henceforth celebrated as a ‘Day of National Renewal’.

It is in this period of upheaval and dramatic change that The Good Shepherd is set. The crime at its centre is based on a true event, which rocked the nation only a few months later, and which will be the subject of the next post.

Watch this space …