The Historian’s Projectionist by RJ Verity

Author RJ Verity‘s new novel Poole of Light is set in twentieth century Britain and is the first in The Poole Legacy trilogy. Set against the rise of British cinema, it tells the story of Jeremiah “Jem” Poole, a coalminer’s son who becomes a cinema magnate while haunted by the past he cannot outrun. 

RJ – also known as Ruth – shares the fascinating story of how this novel came to be. Over to you, RJ.

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The Historian’s Projectionist: Splicing a Novel from Fragments of Britain’s Cinema Past by RJ Verity

The spark for Poole of Light came from my father’s memories of working as a teenage projectionist in Leeds, in the cinema his own father managed. He mentioned enough for me to glimpse that world — the routine of handling reels, watching from the projectionist box, the sense that film was both work and wonder. They made me curious about how the cinema shaped lives — and how one boy might seize that light to build a future.

Turning that curiosity into a novel was another challenge altogether. I imagined the task would be like designing a grand picture palace: lay the foundations, raise the walls, add the domes and chandeliers. In reality, it was closer to being a projectionist — taking separate reels of research, splicing them together, and hoping that when the light finally hit the screen, the fragments would run seamlessly as story.

Timelines as Scaffolding

I knew early on that it was the historical facts that would be driving the story. You cannot invent a cinema magnate in 1920s–30s Britain without tangling with the record: legislation, the shift to sound, distribution deals, architectural booms and financial shocks.

Linda Wood’s British Films 1927–1939 became one of my first reels. Its year-by-year chronology — studio openings, mergers, legislation, even industry hiccups — gave me a pulse of the period. I built a working timeline from those dates, then asked practical questions at each step: when could Jem plausibly open his first theatre? how would quota changes affect programming? what would the arrival of sound do to his balance sheet and capacity to adapt?

Splicing those dates into narrative form was as creative as it was factual. I traced dependencies — when exhibition boomed, when distribution tightened, when independents were squeezed by circuits — and dropped Jem into those currents where they served his character arc.

Picture Palaces as Characters

If Wood gave me a backbone of reels, Allen Eyles’s books on the Odeon circuit provided the colour and texture. His accounts of Oscar Deutsch’s art deco palaces — domed ceilings, mirrored foyers, bold geometry — turned buildings into characters. Odeons were not just venues; they were statements. For a boy who once slipped into Spennymoor’s grand electric hall, the grandeur of marble foyers and sweeping staircases, years later, meant more than decoration. They signalled the possibility of becoming someone else.

I threaded in details wherever I could find them. A stair rail glinting under low light. The smell of polish on brass. The hush as carpets absorbed the clatter of a Saturday crowd. These details, drawn from research, gave me the sensory material to project a 1930s Odeon onto the page — not as a nostalgic postcard, but as a lived space of ambition and escape.

Staying True to What I Used

Research is rarely one neat reel. For Poole of Light, I leaned on a wide range of sources — from Wood’s chronology of the British industry and Eyles’s studies of Odeon architecture, to local histories of Leeds at war, memoirs of going to the pictures, and even Graham Greene’s film criticism, which gave me the cadences of how movies were discussed in their own time. Together, they allowed me to splice the factual and the imaginative into a continuous run.

Where the record didn’t hand me a ready-made scene, there were days when I spent hours down a rabbit hole, only to emerge with a single line — or sometimes just a clearer sense of what it was like to live through it all. The goal wasn’t to document everything — it was to keep the reel turning smoothly, so the fictional path felt structurally true. Sometimes that meant getting feedback from the National Railway Museum to check how competing train routes shaped travel from London to Leeds, or wrestling with the timeline of a wartime pregnancy so it didn’t collide with documented historical events.

From Timeline to Narrative Choice

There does come a point when history needs to be cut and spliced to fit the story. The late 1920s brought purpose-built, showpiece cinemas to British towns and cities, but Jem Poole is not Oscar Deutsch. His decisions, his failures, his ghosts demanded adjustments. I moved certain developments around and folded anonymous anecdotes into personal turning points.

The art lies in knowing where to cut, where to overlap, and where to let the frame jump. History provides the reel; fiction determines how it is projected.

The Emotional Core of Research

What surprised me most was how often the driest sources became the most emotional. A line about new safety regulations conjured the terror of nitrate film igniting in a booth above a crowded auditorium. A note on construction costs became Jem scanning his ledgers for savings, praying the numbers would stretch to his dream. A brief mention of a circuit expanding transformed into a moment of mixed awe and dread: is he standing on the brink of greatness, or about to be swallowed?

This, for me, is the magic of writing historical fiction: turning footnotes into heartbeat.

Writing into the Light

By the time Poole of Light reached its final form, a timeline stretched the length of my study wall, while my working documents — never meant for the page — lay scattered everywhere. None of them appear directly in the novel. But without them, Jem’s journey would have floated free of history. The scaffolding disappears, leaving only the story of a man who dreamed of light and built a world to hold it.

And that, perhaps, is the gift of being a projectionist-historian: taking scattered reels of fact and memory, and splicing them into a film that runs unbroken for the reader.

What a great experience you’ve shared with us, RJ. I love the way you used film and film industry analogies to bring your thoughts and the story together.

Poole of Light by RJ Verity

A golden age. A shadowed past.

In 1913, ten-year-old Jeremiah “Jem” Poole sees a moving picture for the first time – and everything changes. Raised in a working-class coal-mining town in northern England, Jem dreams of a life beyond soot, sorrow and poverty.

When tragedy forces him to leave home, Jem begins a lifelong journey through war, reinvention, and the golden age of British cinema. By the 1930s, he has become a prominent figure in the UK’s film industry, building a career amid social change, personal loss and the shadows of his past. But when someone from his childhood reappears, long-buried memories resurface – forcing Jem to confront the cost of his success and the story he’s been telling himself for decades.

Set against the backdrop of both World Wars and the evolution of cinema, Poole of Light is a powerful, emotionally resonant debut for readers who enjoy character-driven historical fiction with depth and heart.

You can also download a free short story by RJ Verity titled Bright Light.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION  FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY. There’s a SUBSCRIBE function on the right hand side of the page. 

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.