Scott Elliott

Scott Elliott writes historical detective fiction. His particular interest is in the moments when history's confident march of progress runs into the things that don't fit — the experiments that went sideways, the discoveries that frightened the people who made them, the spaces in the record where something happened and the official account goes carefully quiet.

The Sparkpunk series grew out of years of reading Victorian history — not the triumphalist version, but the grimy, contradictory, fog-soaked reality beneath it. The 1860s in particular: a decade of galvanic science pushing up against genuine uncertainty about the nature of life, consciousness, and electrical force. A decade of reform and Fenian unrest and a Metropolitan Police that was simultaneously the most sophisticated in the world and comprehensively for sale.

Thomas Fenwick — the series' central detective — emerged from that history as naturally as coal smoke from a chimney. A man of the city, shaped by its corruptions, governed by a personal code that the city has never managed to crack.

Mortal Current, the first novel in the Sparkpunk series, is forthcoming.