I had a lot of fun with this one, researching the early days of the British secret service and SOE and then, in the second half of the story, sending my heroine, Li Bic, to Manchester's Chinatown - which didn't actually exist in 1895, but this is my alternate history, so in my universe the Chinese started arriving from Hong Kong in the 1860s instead of the 1960s.
I was at a panel discussion at EasterCon last year, at the Manchester Hilton, which was talking about Manchester's rich history and wondering why more stories are not set there, especially in the Steampunk genre, when Manchester was the manufacturing capital of the world as far as cotton was concerned!
I'd already decided to send Bic there, but hearing the talk gave me added confidence - it would have been lazy to send her to London, and I wanted to play with the history of my home city.
And, since Bic is undercover as an American newspaper reporter, here are the offices of the Manchester Guardian, which she visits in the course of the story.
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