Before writing Dream Whisperer, I entirely re-read Lovecraft. I did no such thing with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which I all consumed in my early twenties. I’ve always had a tender spot for Mycroft Holmes, ‘Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother’. In Conan Doyle’s stories, he’s a far more mysterious and underdeveloped character than Sherlock himself, which opens a lot of opportunities. In Dream Whisperer, he’s the man behind the curtains with an iron grip on British politics. He’s the ultimate decision-maker who isn’t made accountable to the public. He isn’t democratically elected and operates in the shadows. The British secret service is his tool to gather information and impose his will. Amongst many other things, he’s the mastermind behind the Versailles Treaty.

He’s a terrifying character. Holmes, or ‘M’ as he’s called throughout the novel — an obvious reference to the eponymous fictional head of MI6 in the James Bond novels — is single-mindedly focused on Britain’s interests. He’ll do anything to cripple the German economy after the war because that will prevent the enemy from rearming. Under his leadership of the Special Branch, relationships with the Faerie suffer because M only cares about what benefits humans. Fleming’s grandmother, a high-ranking elf, has his number: he’s cruel and ruthless, always wheels within wheels.

M is an upstart. All his life, he’s aspired to ascend to the ranks of nobility. When he’s finally ennobled by Queen Victoria — a story I’ll tell in the next instalment in the series — he has no compunctions about displaying his title, unlike Fleming and his ancestors, who’ve always refrained from doing so.

For all his intellectual firepower, M is remarkably short-sighted. He tries to maintain a short and medium-term status quo to preserve Britain’s stature as a world power. But as the Great War ends, the decline of the Empire sets in — although, surprisingly, the Empire’s size will continue to expand until the 1940s — and M has to deal with new realities, such as the rise of the USA as the new top dog in world politics and subject nations insisting on home rule. In the background of the Dream Whisperer storyline, the reader can notice the Irish situation festering. In the sequel I’m currently writing, Egypt’s first attempt at independence is skilfully thwarted by M.

M seems to have one soft spot. He’s charmed by Rebecca Mumm’s analytical mind and keeps her on board of the Special Branch even when she’s no longer the French liaison officer.

I had me some fun in Dream Whisperer poking at the Holmes mythology. In my novel, Sherlock did effectively die at the Reichenbach Falls, just as Arthur Conan Doyle intended before public outcry forced him to bring back to life the character he’d grown so tired of. M can’t stand Doyle, and his relationship with his brother is even more complicated than suggested by that author. Watson never existed, and M’s club isn’t called The Diogenes Club. It all serves to illustrate another point in the novel: nothing is quite what you think it is.