Location, Location: Thorne Moore
I have written books set in urban and rural locations and there’s a completely different feeling to both. Urban settings can be various – the noisy, busy, forward-looking thrust of the city, the hopeless desolation of post-industrial wastelands, the pretences and delusions of respectable suburbs, the civil collapse of run-down estates. All offer potential themes for the crime writer.
So does the countryside, with scope for cosy crime among thatched cottages and village greens, as well as dark and primitive undertones for the more sinister, where secrets can be buried deep.
I have written two books, Motherlove and The Unravelling, mining my memories of Luton, my birth town, although I call it Lyford. Luton has a very long history – at least back to 3,000 BC at the Waulud’s Bank Neolithic site – but you’d be hard put to notice it. Waulud’s Bank is a littered swamp with a grated concrete culvert. Luton is a town in the moment, changing, often grumpily, to confront a new future and usually happy to sweep away any trace of the past. It is, and has long been, a town of immigration – incomers from other countries, other continents and other parts of the UK – hence my Welsh family moving there in the 1930s. It’s a place of change, a place where you can be anonymous and never know your neighbours, but be confident that Big Brother will have a CCTV camera on you, sometime in the day.
But I have also made full use of North Pembrokeshire as a setting. It’s the place where I’ve lived for the past forty years, and the place where my ancestors lived (and died) up to the late nineteenth century, when they upped and went. That’s the thing about Pembrokeshire, as opposed to Luton. It is the past. Like Luton, it has a history traceable back to Neolithic times, but in this case you can’t miss it. It’s there all around you, poking through the surface on hills scarred with cairns, and pocket-sized fields whose boundaries were marked out when wolves and bears were lurking in the oakwoods. It’s a land of emigration – or at least it was until the old declining industries that were ceasing to sustain it were replaced by tourism. Even with English incomers and holiday-home owners, it is insular, cut off, wary of change.
My first novel, A TIME FOR SILENCE, set in North Pembrokeshire, was inspired by a bit of gossip I was told; a man had been murdered some years/decades before, and everyone, including the police, knew who had done it but no action was taken. People kept shtum. Who knows if there was any truth in the story, but I can believe it would have been possible in one of the isolated and claustrophobic communities of this area, whereas it would never have been possible back in Luton. There would have been too many people to keep quiet, too many passers-by, too much pressure for authorities to act. I could not have set the story in Luton.
While I find general locations an essential ingredient in my books, houses in particular are my fascination. They say dogs and owners tend to resemble each other, but the same can be said of houses, reflections of their owners and therefore essential to a good story. Could you have Darcy without Pemberley?
In my latest book, BETHULIA, detective Rosanna Quillan studies a four-storey house in Oxford and figures out all she needs to know about the residents on the different levels. We’ve all done that. Please tell me you’ve done it and it’s not just me. People do imprint themselves on their homes. Their lives, trials and aspirations are embedded in them.
If houses were dogs, a lot of them would be rescue mutts, because people have lived in them before, and left their own imprint. Houses are micro-history in solid form. Peel back the wallpaper of the previous resident, and who knows what you’ll find. They can change, be restyled, morphing over time, but still the memory of the past is buried in their walls. They will have seen it all, love and hate, work and leisure, birth, growth and death. Definitely death.
I am not above making my fictional houses characters in their own right, at the beating heart of a story. In A TIME FOR SILENCE, the cottage of Cwmderwen (actually based on a derelict cottage two fields down from the end of my garden) is central to the plot. When Sarah Peterson comes across it and realises it was where her Owen grandparents had lived in the 1930s and 40s, she discovers her grandfather was murdered there. It’s a link to a past she can’t understand, and it’s riddled with more than just memories. I follow its history further back in THE COVENANT, so intertwined with the history of the Owen family that it takes blood to separate them.
In my two companion novels SHADOWS and LONG SHADOWS, a house again is central to the story. Not a cottage, this time, but a decaying mansion, because Pembrokeshire is full of them. They lurk on the hills, in the valleys, round corners, hidden in trees. Some have been left in ruins. Some have been rescued and reincarnated as hotels, nursing homes, art centres, health spas. Most have an appearance of Victorian sturdiness, but some hide hints of older times – a barn that began as a Tudor gatehouse, a bit of Jacobean panelling in the drawing room. How many forgotten secrets are they hiding? There’s inspiration in all of them.
My fictional Llysygarn is hiding quite a few secrets. Kate Lawrence, in SHADOWS, has an unfortunate tendency to unearth the darker ones, while helping to create one of her own. Secrets buried in time may never be explained. They will remain a puzzling mystery forever… except, of course, that I, as author, can exercise my God complex and know all, which I reveal in LONG SHADOWS, taking the history of the house and its mysteries all the way back to the 14th century and beyond. As I’ve said, it’s impossible to escape the touch of history in this part of the world. It’s the future that’s more evasive.
When writing about location, I should mention that I also write science fiction with a trilogy centred on Triton, the moon of Neptune. It is a location I have very little personal experience of. In fact, none, but I do know that it’s the coldest place in our Solar System and therefore a perfect metaphor for the lowest circle of Hell. That is another place I have not yet visited, but for now I am content to rely on Dante’s description as inspiration.
Crime Cymru 