From the very beginnings of the VAMPIRATES saga, I was always keen to put strong women characters at the centre of the action. So you have Cheng Li, young and ambitious deputy of The Diablo, and “Cutlass” Cate Morgan in charge of weapons and attack strategy. And of course there’s Grace Tempest, the heroine of the sequence, who has a quiet strength from the beginning, which builds book by book. But, all things considered, I think the strongest of all my female characters is Lola Lockwood Sidorio. If VAMPIRATES was a TV show, she’d definitely be the one who comes at the end of the credits!
Where did Lola come from? Well, by the time I’d written the third main novel in the sequence, BLOOD CAPTAIN, I took stock of my cast of characters and felt as though I was now in a similar position to a director on “Eastenders” or “Coronation Street”, with a large and unwieldy mob to assign storylines to. I was generally pleased with the division of characters between the “goodies” and the “baddies” at this point in the saga. Heading up the rogue Vampirates, I had Sidorio, with his two “young” deputies Johnny Desperado and (Jez) Stukeley. But I realised I had a vacancy. Though there were strong women all over the story, there was no truly evil female Vampirate. That’s what I was looking for from Lola and she has more than delivered on that promise.
In the saga, her origin story is that she was a bored aristocrat who decided to spice up her life by becoming a Highwaywoman. She was killed mysteriously during an attack and crossed over into the vampire realm. In time, seeing that there were opportunities to build power on the oceans, she decided to become a Vampirate captain and started her small but deadly ship, The Vagabond, with its all female crew.
Lola was inspired by Lady Barbara Skelton, the lead character in the 1945 movie “The Wicked Lady” starring Margaret Lockwood, and by the main character Lady Dona St Columb in Daphne DuMaurier’s novel, Frenchman’s Creek. In the first, a bored aristo decides to become a Highwaywoman; in the second, another bored aristo takes up with a pirate. My bored aristo does both and then some!
Visually, I wanted Lola to be as glamorous as Angelina Jolie. I got the idea for her black heart tattoo from a fashion spread in Vanity Fair magazine, where one of the models is sporting a “spades” motif around her eyes. It’s always important to me to get an idea of how my characters talk and with Lola, I thought back to Margaret Lockwood and that peculiar ‘clipped’ way of talking by British actors of that era. I think that Lola’s upper-crust Britishness and her obsession with manners makes a useful counterpoint to her villainy. I love the fact that she can be serving you tea in a china cup one minute and have a knife in your heart moments later.
Originally, she was going to be Lady Angelika Lockwood, but I thought that the alliteration of Lady Lola Lockwood worked just that bit better. I then heard the old song, “Whatever Lola Wants… Lola gets!”, and, frankly, that sealed the deal.
Lola has given me some of my favourite scenes across the sequence. Two that stand out are her rather gothic wedding in BLACK HEART (which I had to keep rewriting to make weirder and wilder) and her Siberian honeymoon in EMPIRE OF NIGHT. But I think my favourite Lola moments are in the new book, IMMORTAL WAR. There’s a nice scene where she feeds blood to her newborn babies, and another where she consults a very particular set of Tarot cards. Earlier in the story, we see her in attack mode though heavily pregnant. Like many of her scenes, it’s brutally horrific but with a hefty dose of humour.
I think in general with Lola’s arrival in the books, I got a better handle on how to do horror and also how to balance it with laughs. Many of the scenes I’ve had the most fun writing are those featuring Lola and Sidorio together. He has become a more intriguing, and perhaps more sympathetic, character since he met her.
So there you have it. Lola wasn’t even a glint in my eye when I embarked on writing the VAMPIRATES books several years ago, but I’m prepared to wager that she’s one of my most memorable creations. It was hard writing her last scene. One of the reviews of VAMPIRATES of which I’m proudest was “Lady Lola Lockwood makes Cruella de Ville look like Mary Poppins”. I can think of no greater praise than that!
If you would like to read more about the Vampirates series, then you can go over to Justins website right here. YAY thank you Justin and thanks to the lovely people at S&S for arranging this fab tour. You all rocketh my faceth off.
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