When Wales Inspires… Clare Mackintosh
On January 1st, 2020, I was waiting on the shores of Llyn Tegid, in Bala, north Wales, along with almost a hundred other swimmers who had gathered for our annual New Year’s Day dip. All around me, I could hear people marvelling over the glass-like waters of the lake and the silhouette of the mountain above it. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ they were saying. ‘What a stunning place to swim.’
I wasn’t thinking that.
I was thinking: what if a body floated through the water towards us?
Such is the inner monologue of we crime writers, who are incapable even of taking a walk in the park without musing (often aloud) on the probable decomposition rates of a shallow grave corpse.
After my swim, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about this fictional body. Where had it come from? The other side of the lake, I imagined, but what was over there? Shortly afterwards, the UK went into lockdown and the border between England and Wales became more significant than it had been for centuries. A story began to take shape. What if the border ran right through the middle of my fictional lake? And what if there were a small, rural community on the Welsh side, and a luxury holiday resort on the English side? What if the dead man had been the property developer? What if he had been Welsh?
So often, books are the answers to questions the author had at the beginning, and I had more than enough to start writing.
That moment on January 1st, 2020 inspired the setting for The Last Party, which features Welsh-speaking detective DC Ffion Morgan. She and her English counterpart, DS Leo Brady, return in the second book in the series, A Game of Lies, in which a reality TV show is being filmed in the mountains above Ffion’s town. The landscape in which I live continues to inspire my writing, and although I tell my friends and neighbours it’s all fictional, there might just be a little bit of Bala in the fictional town of Cwm Coed…
Clare Mackintosh is a former police officer and the multi-award-winning author of seven Sunday Times bestsellers. Together, her books have been translated into 40 languages and sold more than two million copies.
Crime Cymru 