The quarreling couple have made up, and the old soldier who's drinking too much has stopped drinking. Everything has been healed. In its historical context I think this kind of escapism is quite poignant, this hope that there's a detective who can just put the evil back in the bottle. It's just a kind of longing for a more innocent period of life that's gone forever, after the Great War. I thought it would be interesting to have a detective who seems to come out of this cardboard world, perhaps carrying a lot of those assumptions about how you can control evil, and throw him into the turmoil of the twentieth century as it runs toward the Second World War and see what happens to him.
Banks seems to be driven by nostalgia.
Well, I suppose that my suggestion is that for many of us nostalgia is a very important emotion. I talked about this in that piece by Suzie Mackenzie as well. I am not referring to the sort of tourist-industry nostalgia invoking past eras. But the pure human emotion of nostalgia harks back to childhood, perhaps before we discovered the world for what it was and what it is. Even if most of us are fortunate not to have gone through a trauma as Christopher Banks did in childhood, we must all come out from our sheltered world as children into the adult world.