This week Crime cymru’s Sian Collins tells us about her new novel which takes us back to a very chilly 1963 …

The truth behind the fiction

My latest novel Tiding (published 2023 by Honno Press) is set in the fictional estuary town of Glanmorfa during the winter of 1963, the year of the Big Freeze. The local piano teacher is found dead and murder is on everyone’s lips. The local police are on the case but there is no sign of the murder weapon, there are no witnesses, and the chief suspect, a deaf mute, cannot be interrogated. Ronald Blight, a detective from Scotland Yard, is summoned to dispatch the case; an Englishman out of his depth in this part of Wales, he becomes embroiled in mysteries far beyond his experience.

The inspiration for my novel comes in part from childhood memory but the plot is inspired by a real murder which took place on the evening of 10^th January 1953 in the ancient township of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.  Elizabeth Thomas, an elderly spinster who worked as a cleaner in several establishments in the town including the church, was discovered badly injured on the floor of her cottage. She had been beaten about the head and stabbed several times. She was taken to hospital in Carmarthen where she died the following morning without having regained consciousness. Suspicion fell on local fisherman and odd job man George Roberts, a deaf mute, known locally as Booda. Detective Inspector Spooner was summoned from Scotland Yard to investigate and swiftly concluded that Roberts must be guilty. He was tried for the murder at the Carmarthenshire assizes in March 1953. In his instruction to the jury, the judge, Mr Justice Devlin, made this comment: ‘the law requires that a man should plead by his own voice and if this man is mute by the visitation of God, then he cannot plead by his own voice.’ The jury found George Roberts not guilty. The murder weapon was never found. Long after Roberts had resumed his quiet life in Laugharne, the case re-emerged in the pages of Hansard, brought to the attention of the then Home Secretary as a miscarriage of justice, alongside other more famous examples in the early 1950’s, notably the hangings of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans.

The bones of this case provided a perfect structure for Tiding. I am interested in exploring the multi-layered, interwoven histories that exist beneath the surface of ordinary locations and the misunderstandings that can arise in a close-knit community. I’m also fascinated by children’s curiosity about death and the afterlife, how superstition and a vivid imagination can conjure terror out of everyday circumstances. The novel is not a re-telling of the Roberts case: all the characters and events are invented. The arrival of an outsider in Glanmorfa, a community governed by strong loyalties and festering secrets, exposes the disturbing interrelationship between the past and the present.

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Sian’s first novel, Unleaving, published  in 2019 by Gomer Press/Y Lolfa, also has its roots in Carmarthenshire soil though the main action moves to the South African landscape of the 1920s. Like Tiding the novel explores the troubled, interconnected relationships of people affected by a long-hidden crime.

You can read more about Sian and her novels here and here