In the name of research

10:40am Tuesday 5th August 2008

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Set in 1826, The Resurrectionist tells the story of Gabriel Swift, who arrives in London to serve an apprenticeship to the city’s greatest anatomist.

But the character gradually gets drawn into the sinister underworld of Georgian Lon-don and becomes embroiled in the resurrection trade, or body-snatching, and eventually discovers that taking a life is easier than it seemed.

Author James Bradley, 41, was inspired to write the book after reading about the Burke and Hare murders — 17 people were killed in 1827 and 1828 by William Burke and William Hare, who then sold the victims’ bodies to Edinburgh Medical College.

Although information about 19th Century London was relatively easy to come by, it was only when he sat down to start writing that Bradley realised his lack of medical knowledge could be a disadvantage. he thought the only way he could realistically describe dissections, would be to see one for himself.

Through a doctor friend, Bradley managed to inveigle his way into six autopsies at a hospital and several dissection classes at a university.

He says of the experience: “It’s very odd and matter-of-fact, but also very intense.

“There’s this thing in front of you and it’s a person, but it’s not a person. You stand there and watch them pull the brain out, thinking, ‘My God, what am I looking at?’.”

However it seems the grisly research paid off, because the book has now been chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read.

Meanwhile Bradley’s first novel, Wrack, is being reprinted this autumn.

In the past he has twice been chosen as one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s best young Australian novelists, as well as winning a number of major international literary awards.

But before he turned to writing full-time, Bradley worked for a judge and then as a lawyer.

“I wasn’t terribly good at either,” he says. “I was already writing and I had a boss who had been a writer himself. I was working part-time and one day he said, ‘You need to start writing full time, or stop,’ and I said, ‘I’ll go full-time.’ “It was really a spur of the moment decision. I still remember walking home and telling my girlfriend I’d quit my job.”

Although Bradley took pains to be historically accurate in The Resurrectionist, he was attracted to writing about body-snatching because of what he sees as its relevance today.

He says: “On the one hand it’s very much a story of its time, but there was also something to me that seemed really contemporary about it.

“It was a world where everything and everyone was for sale.

“The notion that you could murder people just to sell their bodies for vivisection is so dreadful, yet today people sell organs from executed prisoners in China and we test drugs in The Third World.

“Like the resurrectionists, we turn the body into something you can make money out of,” he argues.

m Bradley will visit Boreham-wood Library, in Elstree Way, on Tuesday at 8pm. Tickets cost £3 including refreshments.

For more information, call 01923 471333.