It’s time to choose the cover for ‘Sudden Deaths’.

I thought about a view of Hampton Court Palace (HCP) in 1653 for my new cover, as there is a chapter based there. I looked for a picture showing the way that it looked mid-seventeenth century, but could only find a sketch which did not show the river entrance that I wanted to highlight.

Even this took a long time – it’s not easy to persuade Google to show you pictures (or paintings, or sketches) from the mid 17th Century (trying prompts like ‘1650’ [too specific], or ‘Early Modern’ [too general]) which often gave results ignoring the period altogether or 16thC or 18thC, or even 1680, which showed the re-modelled HCP, post accession of William & Mary.

Results included the series of paintings known as the ‘Hampton Court Beauties’, also post 1677 and not quite the prominences of HCP I wanted.

In the end I gave in and asked ChatGPT to give me a view of HCP in 1650 and it came up with a really nice picture it had cobbled together from a variety of drawings and paintings of the period. It showed exactly the features I wanted and came with a legend showing what the different parts of the building were – though I then asked it to remove the labels, which it did.

The image betrays its AI roots in the shadows – one chimney has its shadow alongside it – and the boats that have wakes, showing they are in motion, but no means of propulsion (perhaps they have outboard motors!).

Nonetheless it would have make a perfectly usable cover, the details being too small for any but the fussiest critic. In the end I decided that, since almost all the action in the book is in the London area, I should use another picture of London, as in the ‘Urchin‘, but I’m keeping that one up my sleeve until publication day.