The Mercury

Liverpool 1818. It was time for Liverpool's leading newspaper The Mercury to recruit a 'young investigative journalist' who it would it train and steep in its reformist outlook. Fighting for social and economic justice in England's 'port of empire.' On his way to interview, Edwin Kearney had taken a shortcut through storm-battered Old Dock. What occurred that morning would shape his life and affect those of all about him. In the aftermath, he would encounter dark forces feverishly at work in this hectic, tumultuous place. Across its quays and warehouses. On its streets and in its shadows. Forces and their instruments, locals and their out-of-town allies, devoted to unrelenting crime, privation and misery. The lives and circumstances of its people little more than a commodity to be weighed, bartered and discarded. The brutal physical removal of one community and to enable the imposition of another. Civic dispossession and the pre-emption of rights. An assault on the undefended by the indefensible. In their way, stood the town's fearless newspaper The Mercury, its remarkable owner and the young man who had unwittingly crossed into Liverpool's netherworld and now found himself at the very heart of The Mercury's proposition that 'the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.' Lives and communities were at stake, the forces against them -native and imported - vicious and formidable- led by one of London's most ingenious and elusive criminals and bolstered locally by his feared Liverpool counterpart. The very existence of Liverpool's crusading newspaper in jeopardy, until a remarkable group of friends and allies also emerged from the shadows.

Michael McCarthy was born and raised in Liverpool and has a continuing association with the city. He is the author of three non-fiction works in Politics and Political History. His most recent book 'Citizen of London', described by Simon Jenkins as 'A masterly London biography' is a detailed social and political account of medieval London's famous four times mayor, Richard Whittington. Cited as one of The Financial Times 'Books of the Week' February 2023, and the subject of a BBC History Extra Podcast. He has also written 'The House That Trust Built -William Brown and the Rise of Brown Shipley in 19th Century Liverpool' a short, commissioned history to mark the 200th anniversary of Brown's arrival in the city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Liverpool History Society. The Mercury is his fiction debut and was sparked by a lifelong passion for his home city and by a chance purchase of an early issue of The Liverpool Mercury. Igniting a keen interest the newspaper's zeal for social reform and economic progress. Michael has a particular interest in the fine lines between fact and fiction. The rest, as they say, is history... and, of course, storytelling.