Tag Archives: crime writing

NELL DIXON SHARES HER INSPIRATION FOR THE MISS UNDERHAY SERIES

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For the last two years I’ve been living full-time in Devon in a small fishing village. If anyone is unfamiliar with the area, it is a particularly beautiful place with sandy beaches, wide rivers, green farmland and historic and lovely towns and villages. Thatched cottages abound in a chocolate box setting. The Miss Underhay series is set in and around Torbay during the 1930’s. Torquay was the birthplace of Agatha Christie so clearly this is a landscape to inspire crime writing!

The world my intrepid amateur sleuth, Kitty Underhay inhabited in 1933 would be familiar to her today despite some damage done by the second world war and over enthusiastic building works in the 1960’s. Punctuating the landscape are several beautiful and unique buildings. All of which feature in or have inspired scenes in the series. Landscape has always been important to me as a writer. I’ve always been fascinated by the built environment and the human stories that are told through both the building and the spaces between them.

One such building is the now sadly neglected Pavilion theatre in Torquay, a gorgeous art deco affair on Torquay seafront. Set amidst green space and flowerbeds, in the twenties and thirties it hosted operas and a beautiful tearoom. It was the place to see and be seen. This was also a building familiar to Dame Agatha Christie. Hopefully it will take its place again soon as one of Torquay’s jewels.

Another favourite building is run by the National Trust, tucked away down a country lane on the way from Torquay to Dartmouth. Coleton Fishacre is a gem of a jazz age country retreat. Once the summer home of the D’Oyly Carte family, it’s set in beautiful gardens that lead to the sea. A wonderful cream tea can be enjoyed, and the house is one of the loveliest places to visit.

In nearby Dartmouth, the inspiration for Kitty’s home is York House. A black and white half-timbered building, it’s easy to picture Kitty and her grandmother running their hotel there. Dartmouth itself is full of amazing buildings, from the medieval Dartmouth Castle which guards the mouth of the river estuary to the Butter walk, a colonnaded stone walkway housing shops and tea rooms. The Butter walk was damaged in the Second World War but has been so well repaired that you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Dartmouth is also home to another incredible building, St Saviour’s Church. Listed as one of the best 100 churches in England, it was constructed around 1372, and underwent significant restoration in 2014 to preserve it for future generations. It has magnificent medieval wooden doors, heavily carved with gryphons and supported on huge iron hinges.

Another building that sums up the spirit of Torbay in the jazz age is a mansion owned by the local council which is now coming back to life. Oldway mansion in Paignton was home to the Singer family, a name known to anyone with an interest in sewing. Oldway mansion was modelled on the Palace of Versaille and the interior is a magnificently painted masterpiece. During the first world war it was a hospital for injured American servicemen and went on to become a country club. The house is currently closed to the public, but the beautiful grounds can be enjoyed by anyone and there is a lovely tearoom. It’s easy to picture Hercule Poirot strolling in the grounds.

As well as the places listed above there is also Greenway House, Dame Agatha Christies’ own home, which is well worth a visit.

Helena Dixon’s latest release in the best-selling Miss Underhay series is Murder at the Highland Castle available as ebook, audiobook or paperback https://www.nelldixon.com

EVONNE WAREHAM ON HQ & HQ DIGITAL’S 2022 CRIME SHOWCASE

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Photo credit: Sian Trenberth Photography

This was a virtual glimpse at what these publishers have coming from their crime authors in 2022, giving the writers the opportunity to talk briefly about their new work.

It was a varied selection but in all cases the importance of character and location were emphasised – and as in all good crime novels there was a lot of talk about secrets.

The books were grouped to give an idea of their themes. First up was the category classed as jet set thrillers. I confess that this was the one that most appealed to me, being closest to what I like to read and write.

Ross Armstrong spoke about The Getaway – set on a private island in Greece where a multi millionaire and his entourage escape to the perfect sunshine holiday. Then someone dies. Scott Kershaw introduced his debut, The Game – five strangers drawn into a deadly contest that they don’t understand, to save the lives of their loved ones.

The next category was City Crime. Getting grittier now, two police procedurals with locations with an authentic feel in London and Yorkshire. Nadine Matheson’s The Binding Room is set in Deptford. A secret room in a church heralds a story involving a serial killer. John Barlow’s Leeds set To the Grave introduces the disturbing premise of a woman who knows she will be murdered.

For the books classed as Countryside Crime remote evocative locations were the key – isolation and unpredictable weather. In Amanda Jennings’ The Haven a self sufficient commune on Bodmin Moor appears idyllic, until things begin to unravel. Neil Lancaster’s police procedural The Blood Tide roves across Scotland from city to countryside with a story of betrayal and corruption. A debut from T Orr Munroe – who was once a CSI officer – Breakneck Point introduces a protagonist from the same profession, exiled to north Devon after exposing corruption, then encountering a serial killer that no-one else believes in.

The next category, Claustrophobic Thrillers, was definitely not for me, but it was good to see fellow Crime Cymru author Louise Mumford presenting her latest book. These stories focussed on confined settings and intense relationships. Louise’s second book The Safe House explores a reclusive mother/daughter relationship that might be one of safety or entrapment. More mothers from Helen Monks Takhar. This time, in Such a Good Mother it is the closed circle of mothers from an elite school and the new recruit who is invited to join them. Louise Hare’s Miss Aldridge Regrets takes place on a transatlantic voyage on the Queen Mary in 1936.  A nightclub singer is offered the chance of a lifetime if she travels to New York. But then comes murder.

The last category was High Concept – and these were unusual crimes. You might call them techno-thrillers. David Koepp’s Aurora is based on the Carrington Event, a geomagnetic solar storm that occurred in 1859, causing auroras in the sky and wiping out the telegraph system. Koepp’s contemporary scenario extinguishes the technology on which Earth now depends so heavily, possibly for years, and follows two characters, one prepared, one not.  The latest book from Linwood Barclay Look Both Ways is perhaps the most intriguing of all the new offerings. Unlike his regular thrillers this one, which he characterised as more like a Michael Crichton, has an island community where the self driving cars have turned homicidal and are hunting.

Plenty of exciting sounding new books here for the spring and summer, whatever your taste in crime.

 

Evonne Wareham PhD writes  romantic thrillers and a romantic comedy with a touch of crime. Her novel A Villa in Portofino was a finalist for the RNA’s Jackie Collins Award 2022.

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: CHRIS LLOYD ON WALES AS A STATE OF MIND

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Wales has an extraordinary breadth of landscapes and moods. From cities to hamlets, from rural idylls to the legacy of the mines. A beautiful country pockmarked by elements of its past that has learnt to make a virtue out of the ravages it’s experienced. It’s a landscape and a history that invite legend and myth to flourish, a haven for stories and storytellers.

So, if that’s the case, why do I set all my books outside Wales?

In many ways, Wales is a state of mind. A way of viewing the world – both our own and others – that is born of being a small nation. How I view the world, the places I’ve lived, the countries I’ve visited, is determined not just by where I happen to be, but where I happen to be from.

When I was twenty, I went to Spain for six months as part of my degree. I ended up going back there after graduating and staying for twenty-four years, twenty of them in Catalonia. My connection with Catalonia – initially the small city of Girona and then the big guns of Barcelona – was immediate. I felt an affinity with its history of being the smaller partner to a more powerful neighbour, a culture that had been denied and pushed and pulled about at various times, a language that had been banned and belittled, and a culture that continued to thrive despite everything it had faced. And I viewed it all through the prism of my own background.

And that is why, despite the richness of Wales as a setting, there was never any question in my mind that I should write about Catalonia. The problem was that I waited until I was living back in Wales before having the idea to write a book set there, a monument to my planning skills. Except it wasn’t a problem. Just as when I’d first gone to live in Catalonia, I found myself looking at Wales through new eyes and finally understanding how I felt about being Welsh, so writing about Girona from a distance actually helped me pin down my thoughts and feelings about my former adopted home. Oddly, I’ve found that to write about somewhere I love, I need a distance from it, which is probably one of my barriers to writing stories set in Wales – I live here.

The first in my Catalan trilogy, City of Good Death, featuring Elisenda Domènech, a police officer in the newly-created Catalan police force, draws enormously from Catalan culture and the history and legends of Girona. A killer is using the Virgin of Good Death, a small statue dating from the Middle Ages, when it served to give convicted prisoners a final blessing before they were led out of the city to their execution, to announce the impending death of someone they feel is deserving of execution. Unfortunately, there are those in the city who agree and who applaud the killer’s every move. Until the victims become less deserving.

It was a similar passion that led to my new series, featuring Eddie Giral, a French police detective in Paris under the Nazi Occupation. I’d been fascinated for years by the notions of resistance and collaboration, and the blurred lines between them, but I wanted to write the story from a Parisian’s point of view, not the guns and guts heroism of the movies, but the day-to-day survival of ordinary people trying to get by. As near to the real history as possible. And I think that that is an essentially Welsh vision of life – an interest in society and community, an affinity with the underdog and the need to preserve a sense of self.

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrislloydbcn

 

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: INTRODUCING CRIME WRITER CHRIS LLOYD

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With writing, there’s always a spark that ignites the flame. In my case, it was a small grey plaque almost hidden inside the entrance to a school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name’s Chris Lloyd and I write crime fiction. I’m from Wales, but I studied Spanish and French at university and fell head over heels in love with the Catalan city of Girona when I spent my study year there. So much so that after I graduated, I hopped straight on the first bus back to Catalonia and there I stayed for nearly a quarter of a century.

I taught English in Girona for a few years before moving to Bilbao, in the Basque Country, where I opened the Oxford University Press office. After that, I moved back to Catalonia – specifically to Barcelona – where I lived for the next sixteen years, apart from a three-year stint in Madrid. I also spent a semester in Grenoble, where I researched the French Resistance movement – you’ll discover the reason for that in a moment.

My job in educational publishing meant that I was paid to travel all around Spain giving workshops and book presentations, which was great fun until it stopped being great fun. That’s when I took voluntary redundancy three days before my fortieth birthday and set up as a Catalan and Spanish translator. I also wrote travel books for Rough Guides at the same time, until my wife and I decided it was time to move to Wales, which is where we live now, in the town where I grew up. All good stories should come full circle.

Which brings me back to the spark.

It was a small grey plaque in a nondescript building and it stopped me in my tracks. It was in the Pletzel, a district of Paris that was home to much of the city’s Jewish population in 1940, and it listed the children from the school who had been sent to Auschwitz and never returned.

I was already researching for a novel set in the city under the Occupation – my fascination with the era and the oddly blurred notions of resistance and collaboration had been ignited when I was in Grenoble – but it was that moment when I felt the small hand of history tug at my sleeve and I knew that I had to tell the story of the city under the Nazis as truthfully as possible.

But I had to tell it my way, through crime fiction. About a Paris police detective, Eddie Giral, a veteran of the last war, who struggles to do his job and retain a moral compass under the new rules imposed on the city and the people. On the day the Nazis enter the city, four Polish refugees are found gassed in a railway truck, and only Eddie among the police feels the need to find out the truth of what happened to them. This will lead him into conflict with his fellow police, an American journalist, the Polish Resistance and, most dangerously of all, the Occupiers. It will also lead him to question decisions he made in the past and decide what he must do to atone in the present.

The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, recently won the HWA Gold Crown Award and was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger. The second book, Paris Requiem, comes out in 2022, and I’m currently writing the third in the series, set at Christmas 1940, although with little seasonal cheer or goodwill.

On which note, please allow me to wish you all the very best of cheer for Christmas and the year ahead. And lots of good books to enjoy.

 

 

Read more about Chris at https://chrislloydauthor.com/

 

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: INTRODUCING CRIME WRITER GAIL WILLIAMS

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I am a writer. That thought has been with me for as long as I can remember. I am a writer.

It’s not complicated, but it’s not something I was confident to say until fairly recently. So, hello, I am GB Williams, a crime writer. I have always known that writing is what I was supposed to do, though not what I’ve always done, still it’s what I’m here to talk about, I’m here to introduce you to my writing.

The Chair is a thriller-romance set on Cader Idris, in beautiful southern Snowdonia. The heart of the story starts with a hacker taking what he shouldn’t in London, and when cyber threats turn to physical threats, he has to run as far from the internet as possible. Remembering his parents’ complaints of no signal in north Wales is what brings him to Cadre Idris. Poor driving and the resulting crash is what keeps him there and draws local vet, Branwen Jones and the local hermit, Cobb, into his world of trouble.

Having grown up in the southeast and lived more than half my life in Wales, I know both sides of this story well enough to feel I can do justice to both worlds.

There are a lot of contrasts between London and Wales. Pace of life. Freshness of the air. The wide-open spaces, or lack thereof. But there are strong similarities too. We are all humans trying to survive after all.

That drive is what takes us all though life, and we discover different things alone the way, sometimes to find what we don’t know we’re looking for, we have to change trajectory.  That’s something I did, moved from a high-pressure office job, to writing and editing, and I love it, never been happier.

Changing trajectory is what I do with the characters in The Chair.

Cobb comes to Pen-Y-Cwm after tragedy changes his life. All he wants to be is alone to avoid heartache – only meeting Branwen threatens to drag him out of such splendid isolation. Branwen is looking to leave Pen-Y-Cwm because she can’t take the isolation and heartache of being there, a pain Cobb’s presence exacerbates. Jay is looking to make a quick buck in London, but to save his life he has to run, ending up in Pen-Y-Cwm. Baron works for money, inflicting pain isn’t what he enjoys, it’s just something he’s paid to do. He goes to Pen-Y-Cwm, because that is where he’s sent. He’d happily leave Branwen and Cobb alone, but they are between him and the mark.

This disparate group of people come together for a life-threatening climax, that you’ll just have to read to find out who survives, and decide for yourself if you think they should.

 

 

The Chair

Cobb retreated to Cadre Idris for a solitary life of peace and quite. It’s a bubble that bursts when he and Branwen Jones, the local vet, find an RTA victim during a blizzard and must shelter him in Cobb’s home.

When London’s underbelly reaches Wales, they discover that modern inconveniences persist, and this isn’t the uncivilization they know nor the one they expected. Their presence throws close-knit community life into stark relief.

Forced to help hide an injured hacker from people who will kill to stop the spread of stolen information, Cobb’s not sure he’s ready to rejoin the world when that means putting another woman in the firing line. Branwen’s not sure she can face the revelation of her darkest secret.

When they face the final showdown, they will all find that a Welsh mountain is no place to hide.

 

Author’s website: https://gailbwilliams.co.uk/

 

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: EVONNE WAREHAM ON WALES AS A SETTING FOR FICTION

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You’ve probably noticed that many romance novels and some crime stories are set in picturesque locations in the British Isles – Scotland and Cornwall are particular favourites.You don’t get books set in Wales quite so often, although dramas like The Pembrokeshire Murders are putting Welsh settings on the screen.

I’m a Welsh writer, living on the South Wales coast, who once worked for the National Parks. That’s a lot of baggage. I’ve set books in Wales in the past and am ambitious to do more. I write in the genre romantic suspense, which is better known in the USA, less so on this side of the Atlantic. If you’ve read books by Nora Roberts, Karen Rose or Karen Robards you’ll have an idea of what I am talking about. Those books are set in places like Sacramento, Washington and New Orleans, or sometimes in the American farmlands or backwoods.

It’s not so much the Welsh urban settings that appeal to me – although I’m sure that Cardiff and Llandudno can be interesting locations, if not sounding quite as glamorous as New York or Los Angeles. The attraction of Wales for me is the potential of the rural and coastal landscape, and the way that it can be turned in two directions. Wales is blessed with mountains, big skies for cloud watching and star gazing, and a beautiful and dramatic coastline, accessible from a coastal path that circles the entire country.

Is there anything more romantic than a deserted beach at sunset on a warm summer evening? A place for lovers to discover each other. But give the story a twist – the same beach in winter, or at night, with a storm blowing, and you have the backdrop for mayhem. A seaside or country cottage can be an idyllic bolt hole from the world or a deserted and lonely trap, with a heroine on the run. Writers think about these things. I’m often told that taking a walk with an author who is sizing up the surroundings for a good place to bury a body is a disconcerting experience. You get the picture.

The historic legacy of Wales, from castles to folklore, is another attraction. Welsh castles range from Castell Coch, a quirky Victorian Gothic Revival built on thirteenth century foundations, to massive medieval fortifications like Caerphilly, which were anything but quirky. The myths and legends of Wales are rich in magic and the supernatural. Traditional customs, like the Mari Lwyd, a poetic wassailing party featuring a horse’s skull, have plenty to tingle the spine.

There is also the attraction of the natural world. One of the perks of being an author is the ability to make your own weather, and Wales has plenty of that to choose from. If you need a fierce storm to strand your hero and heroine together, you’ve got it. Two of the things I like to play with as a writer are the impact of silence and writing against expectation of the setting. The silence of a lonely location can be peaceful or sinister, or even better, progress from one to the other.  A setting can echo a character’s mood – like a wet day reflecting bad news, but it can be very effective when bad things happen in good places. Being surrounded by beauty and sunshine can make a threat even more devastating.

Those are the things I get from setting a book in my home country. For me the landscape has romantic beauty and a wild and potentially sinister edge. As a Welsh writer, I want to be able to share that with readers.