Toby Schmitz Q&A - author of The Empress Murders

We chat with award-winning playwright and actor, Toby Schmitz about their novel The Empress Murders.

A&U: Hey Toby! Thanks for chatting with us. First up, Can you tell us a little about your debut novel The Empress Murders?

TS: A murder mystery on board a luxurious ocean liner in 1925 descends into noir thriller and gothic horror. It’s Christmas, 1925, on board the Empress of Australia, an ocean liner making the Atlantic run. Someone is bumping people off onboard, and the first half presents the murders ‘in the wings’ until the blood is right before us. The second half sees the story change as the question changes from ‘who is it’ to ‘how will he be stopped’ until the climax combines thrill with post-modern horror.

All bookended by a ghost story.

A&U: What inspired you to write this story?

TS: The Empress Murders started life as a play twenty years ago. Most of my writing, from youth, has been about finding something that I or my friends can be in, or direct, from stand-up comedy, to full-length plays. I had written several plays in the hope of a Main Stage theatre company usurping one, and so they were increasingly minimalist, you know, four middle-class people on a couch, to appear attractive budget-wise, until my friend suggested I write something on the opposite end of the scale, budget be damned.

So, I started putting ideas into a box:

Firstly, I was interested, and always have been, in the kind of gothic horror that was seen a lot on Victorian stages but rarely these days. There were some news stories at the time about terrible events occurring on luxury ocean liners. One of my very favourite plays is the hilarious and clever Rough Crossing by Tom Stoppard. The notion of a murder mystery also appealed, I think Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is a perfect and entertaining bit of clockwork.

I wondered if a serial killer at large on an ocean liner might have the nightmare horror quality I was seeking. I wanted to do some justice to this notion, not just use it as a device, I lived under the shadow of a local serial killer in my youth, in fact he wasn’t caught until recently, and it has always preyed on my mind. I still wanted the story to be about something I considered important, and as a student of 20th century history, I have always been fascinated how after the horrors of WWI the world ran headlong into the unimaginable terror of the Holocaust. At university I was fortunate to have some brilliant tutors excelling in post-colonial studies, in fact this was a fertile period for public discussion about the crimes of colonialism and imperialism.

Now my story was starting to cook, and when I discovered a real-life ocean liner called The Empress of Australia, operating in the 1920s, my metaphor, though a tad obvious, seemed to have appeared. I secretly wanted to attempt an ‘Australian story’ (there was, and is, so much discussion especially amongst funding bodies about them), without having to set it in the outback where a whole lot of monosyllabic men can’t communicate with each other.

The play went on to some success, and over the years I further adapted it into a screen treatment. However, several colleagues had suggested it be a novel, and maybe always should have been one first. When the pandemic landed, I dusted it off, started the story from scratch, filling in backstory (which, freed from the stage, no longer seemed an indulgence, but rather a necessity) and reworking the narrative-eye and plot to suit the page, and didn’t stop writing it until this year.

It’s a thriller, I guess, though we all get thrills in different ways. It’s a romp with some very dark undercurrents. It’s set on a luxury ocean liner in 1925, doing the Portsmouth to New York Atlantic run. I had a grand time populating this ship, with decadent jazz era passengers. Also, a serial killer, and a not particularly competent ship detective.

A&U: Did you have any particular literary influences in mind when writing The Empress Murders?

TS: Patricia Highsmith (her unsurpassed use of dread), Thomas Harris (not so much Robert), Martin Amis, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Noël Coward, P.G. Wodehouse, WWI poets (Sassoon, Graves, and Read, for my money), Tom Stoppard.

A&U: When it comes to writing – are you a plotter or a pantser?

TS: I plot. I always have. I can’t start without a beginning, middle, and end in my head. These oftentimes change once I set out, but without them my story stalls in the dock, or worse, out in the middle of the ocean.

A&U: The Empress Murders is a truly original whodunnit and has been described as a ‘unique beast’ and a ‘wild ride’ – what would you like readers to take away from reading this story?

TS: I intend it to be entertaining, to give the same endorphins as a thriller with some laughs on the way. To be escapist on one level, and uncomfortably close in others. A shudder, a shiver on the curtain would be appropriate.

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The Empress Murders

by Toby Schmitz

The Empress Murders is a razor-sharp, mind-bendingly clever novel that is both a witty, bloodthirsty whodunnit and an excoriating look at the excesses of the British Empire, just as the sun begins to set on it.

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