The Paradox Club Book 8 – The League of Temporal Gentlemen – is the book that begins Phase Two of the Paradox Club series. The cover features John Smith the Chronomancer and Captain Moore, head of the League.
In planning the series, before I had even started writing the first book, I took my inspiration from the MCU, viewing the entire thing as one big, ongoing story told in three Phases: Beginning, Middle and End.
Phase One is the first seven books in the series, from The Valentine Trap to Future Times Past, and that Phase concludes with Captain Moore sending Valentine & Milo as far away as he can from the chronovores that are hunting them.
Phase Two starts here and doesn’t directly continue the story from Book 7. Instead, we go back in time and explore the story of the League in more depth, a story that will, in time, rejoin Valentine & Milo. It’s an ideal jumping on point for a new reader who wants to see if The Paradox Club is their kind of thing before committing to buying every book in the series.
The cover for this book is slightly different to the covers for the previous seven books. The basic design is still the same, only now the cover characters are in front of a swirly vortex rather than a spiral staircase. It’s more of a tweak than a rethink. This will be the cover style for the remainder of Phase Two. When we move into Phase Three it will get tweaked again, into something the same but different.
I’ve also changed the logline at the top of the cover to The Chronoverse Chronicles, something that better reflects the story content of Phase Two. Haunted By The Past, Hunted By The Future, while great, didn’t really fit with what happens in the second Phase of the story, where the intention is that the books will be more self-contained rather than following directly on from each other.
As for the organisation that the book is all about, the origins of The League of Temporal Gentlemen are not that hard to discern, especially if you substitute “Temporal” for “Extraordinary”! I loved the idea of a Victorian Time Travel Agency rather than one from the future, allowing me the chance to create something with a “Steampunk” vibe.
But there are plot threads connected to the League that we haven’t explored yet and doing so in the first seven books wasn’t an option as there were already more than enough characters for readers to keep track of. So in this book, we go back to when we first met them and tell those parts of their story that I had to leave out first time around.
Which isn’t to say that this is simply repackaged material from the earlier books. There are new scenes, new linking material and those scenes that readers have read before, such as the chronovore attack on Ravenfell from Book Four, are retold from a different persepctive, namely that of the Captain and the Matron, rather than Susan and Smith.
Things kick off with the theft of the Temporal Hourglass by the Paradox Club and along the way we learn something of the backstory of Captain Moore and Matron Hodgkin and delve deeper into their connection to Valentine & Milo. As well as events that took place before we first met them, there are other things being set up that will pay off in a few books’ time. And yes, Queen Victoria does make an appearance, though not in the way you might expect.
The books so far have featured a large ensemble cast of characters, but this is the first one where we more or less follow two characters through the story. Readers may have noticed that there are several couples or double acts in the books: Valentine & Milo themselves, Susan & Smith, Penny & Tuppence, the Captain & the Matron, Sixie & Perry, Victoria Winter & Mayfair Strange, Mandrake & the Minister…
Writing two already connected characters gives you more options than one character trying to connect to another, and I think part of their appeal comes from Steed & Mrs Peel. When I initially thought up Valentine & Milo, that was the relationship I was thinking of.
Plotting out this eighth book led me to work out where the series goes next, which means that the outlines for books 9 and 10 have been finished and work will start on them soon, Together with this book, Book 8, the next two books, 9 and 10, will form a loose trilogy of sorts, ending with us finding out What Happened Next when Captain Moore sent Valentine & Milo through that time door to escape the chronovores. But they will never be far behind…
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