The Book of Secrets

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank everybody who helped and encouraged me in writing this book. Dr Natalia Nowakowska of Somerville College, Oxford for sharing her research on early printing; Maxime Préaud at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who generously allowed me to examine the original playing cards; Dr Allen and the Mystery Writers’ Forum; Oliver Johnson, collaborator and editor; the Banse family and Isabella Paul for their hospitality in Germany and much else; my family, especially my father for his German expertise; Jon, Sarah and Agnes Hawkins, for whom The Rhineland Testament remains one of the great fictive might-have-beens; my agent Jane Conway-Gordon, despite her threats to withhold chocolate cake; the Inter-Continental Literary Agency; John Kelly; Charlotte Haycock and everyone at Random House; the staffs at the British Library in London and Boston Spa, the York Minster Library, and the JB Morrell library at the University of York.

After eight books, it would be easy to take my wife Emma’s patience and support for granted: instead, it only seems more extraordinary. She made what could have been a particularly challenging writing period one of the calmest I can remember.

My son Owen arrived a month after I began this book. He came along on my research trip, charmed his way across Europe, and was exposed to more Gothic architecture than is safe for any five-month-old. He also contributed random punctuation in the moments when he got through my defences to the keyboard. Born into a world where the communications revolution begun by Gutenberg is reaching unfathomable new dimensions, this book is for him.