A Different Sort of Mystery

I know, I know. What I’m about to say is at best ill-advised, and the sound you can hear is that of a whopping great stone crashing through my own glass house. When I go and inspect the damage I daresay I’ll find it more extensive than I thought, but I’m going to say it anyway.

I’ve read a lot of ordinary books recently.

Now the caveats. I’ve actually enjoyed them all. They’ve been well-written and their settings have been appealing. Their characters have been interesting. They’re just the type of book I’m aspiring to write myself, in fact. By ordinary I don’t mean bad. I just mean samey. And yes it’s the genre and yes it’s what readers want. I know all that. But.

Maybe it’s the heat that’s giving me a terrible sense of ennui. Maybe what I need is some sparkling wit and a Martini, rather than sitting on my own with a hot, grumpy cat and a glass of tepid Ribena. But suddenly I find I’m tired of reading all these crime novels and I want something different.

Fortunately help is at hand, in the shape of the latest crime novel by Ian Sansom. Sansom’s books are a bit light on crime, but they do have an original theme, a very jolly writing style (and a wit as dry as my non-existent Martini) and a cast of original and entertaining characters.

The concept is a series of murder mysteries set in the counties of England during the 1930s. The narrator, Stephen Sefton, is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War with all the traumas that involves, not to mention a penchant for some of the sleazier entertainments that London has to offer. His big break, if you can call it that, comes in the opening book where he becomes employed by the extraordinary Swanton Morley, an encyclopaedia of a man whose mission its to augment his phenomenal output of books and articles with a guide to each of the counties — each one researched and written in a week or so.

Essex Poison is the fourth of them, and the pattern is familiar. Sefton and Morley travel round in a Lagonda driven by Morley’s sassy and very modern daughter, Miriam, who’s way out of Sefton’s league and besieged by alternative suitors, while some of the more villainous characters from Sefton’s past are in pursuit for payment of his debts.

To date there have been murders in Norfolk, Devon and Westmorland, and now the caravan has alighted in Essex. At an oyster festival, a local dignitary dies. Was it poison?

In actual fact I didn’t really care what happened. (I did say it was light on the mystery.) It was fun, it was different, and there’s a serious underlying theme as Sefton struggles with his demons (to which, of course, his employer is totally oblivious).

I’ll go back to my ordinary mysteries. After all, they’re a well-tested genre and there are so many, so similar, because it works. But sometimes you want something different, and by the next time I’m in need of an alternative twist on crime, I hope the next book in the series will be out.

Me and the Ghosts of Mardale Green

The old field walls of Bowderthwaite
on the shores of Haweswater 

I love a good walk. I was down in the Lakes recently, and rather than go to the gym I got up early, packed my breakfast and headed off for a scenic walk. Just as I did for the walk I described in my last blog I picked Mardale, which happens to be where my current protagonist, Jude Satterthwaite goes to clear his head. 

This time, I chose to walk round the lake rather than head up the dale. It was hot, and the route is much flatter and there is, crucially, no bog, though there are other hazards. Haweswater as we see it isn’t entirely natural, but a larger lake resulting from the expansion of the original body of water following the building of a dam in the 1930s. 

The new reservoir flooded the village of Mardale Green, leaving us one of those drowned villages that are common across the UK and that occasionally reappear in times of drought.

The long-submerged walls and old bridge
emerge from the lake

As you may be aware, it’s been incredibly dry in the UK recently, and Cumbria’s lake levels have dropped dramatically. On an earlier visit, a lady I met on my walk informed me that we would soon be able to see the church tower, which we never will because the church, like every other building in the dale below the waterline, was demolished, though the village bridge does appear along with the footprint of its buildings. 

Even the ducks sink into the soft mud.
Maybe one day these will be fossil footprints.

The village hasn’t emerged yet, though its presence is slowly crystallising as the water level drops. For my walk I left the main footpaths and walked around to Riggindale, out of sight of the car park and much of the road. Once there I followed the shore back round until I ran into rocks and had to scramble up the bank and into the woods. 

If you look at old maps (you’ll find one here) then you can see where the old houses are. I spotted the ruins of Fieldhead and the skeleton of its bridge. On the other side of the lake, the remains of the farms of Goosemire and Grove Bridge were printed on the landscape. Ducks had left their footprints on the rapidly-drying mud, making fossils for the future. Most hauntingly, I could see the trees. Cut down before flooding, their stumps roots are still there, the soil washed away from under them so that they stood free on the rocky shore like stranded aliens. 

The line between the lucky and the unlucky -
trees above and below the new shore.

It was an amazing walk, made all the better for being so early in the morning that I met nobody. I doubt I’ll ever weave it into a story, because someone somewhere will have done that before, far more elegantly than I ever could. But it’ll be a long time before I forget that sunny early morning on the parched shores of Haweswater. 

Just me, a couple of sheep, several dozen ducks and the ghosts of Mardale Green.