New King Palmers

Winner of the 2018 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction. The novel is set in the late 1990s, in the months up to and after the death of Princess Diana. It is narrated by its principal character Humfrey Joel, who is a close friend of Earl Eliot d’Oc. The earl’s ancestry is closely bound up with the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and d’Oc is a member of the British Privy Council and a close friend of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. In the months preceding Diana’s death, d’Oc commissions a newly emerging theatre director to complete a theatrical project centred on constitutional issues surrounding Prince Charles. The play he commissions is called New King Palmers and d’Oc maintains rigorous editorial control over it. When d’Oc’s death shortly follows Princess Diana’s, Humfrey Joel finds himself named as d’Oc’s literary executor, charged with the task of bringing the play to the English stage and to publication. We now learn that supposedly written into the text is an encoded message from the British Privy Council on behalf of the House of Windsor addressed to the then stewards of the European Union, with the heir’s interests served by UK withdrawal from the EU, before it becomes a federal superstate. When news of this leaks out no one in the British literary and theatrical worlds believes it. In fact most come to see Earl d’Oc as an invented character Humfrey Joel is using as a shield for himself, whatever his motives might be. All this Joel vigorously denies, though his real secret makes him much more personally vulnerable than anyone can imagine.
Joel comes to work closely with Daphne Hao, an emerging theatre director, and as they join forces in bringing the play to the English stage much is revealed of d’Oc’s European ancestry, and the levers of power his family has had its hands to. Over the course of the book, we see this range from Simon de Montfort, after the Albigensian Crusade, to the inner core of the Nazi party when Hess and Hitler rose to prominence. We learn too that the source of the d’Ocs’ enormous family wealth has been control of the European salt trade. We also begin to suspect that Earl Eliot d’Oc may have been Joel’s biological father.
The message encoded in the play is cleverly disguised through the depiction of intimate scenes in the lives of the Prince and Princess of Wales, wheile they were together, with the controversy this is likely to arouse deflecting general attention from the play’s real purpose. On its first performance it is greeted with hostility (though does fare well from a tour through the Low Countries). Furthermore there is incredulity in the theatre and artistic world that an English earl has written the play at all, and it is this that leads to speculation that the real author is Humfrey Joel. From this moment Joel finds himself hounded by the tabloid press, and pursued by British intelligence services, to the point that his life becomes unbearable. From here he must find inventive ways of keeping the world at bay and protecting himself. As a chronicle written from Humfrey Joel’s viewpoint, the remainder of the story describes that undertaking, though increasingly we, the readers, can’t be certain of the veracity of his claims, and like others can even come to doubt the authenticity of d’Oc as author.
The book’s setting is mainly London, with excursions to the earl’s country estate. As a whole it plays on conspiracy theories attaching to Princess Diana’s death, highlighting specific historical precedents to it.