October 24th: Off to Basingstoke for the crime writing festival and a panel discussion with Matthew Sweet and Julia Anderson. At the station I’m confronted by the sensational news that this is the birthplace of Jane Auston – what she thought of Churros is lost to history. The panel, chaired by the excellent Heather Fitt, was – I hope – a good listen. The subject was historical crime fiction. I’m on shaky ground here, in that I only turned to the genre becuase I thought setting a crime thriller in Cambridge would be mired in cliche, and so I went back in time – to the last war – in order to avoid vicars on bicycles, grumpy porters, punting posh people etc.. And so I have never thought of myself as an historian in any way. In contrast Matthew and Julia had clearly turned academic minds on the past, gathered up the facts, and then set the stories beautifully within that lost moment: Matthew in a New Forest village, Julia in a south London hospital, the war, and the post-war era, loomed large in both. Both my fellow authors had much more respect for historical detail than I. My ‘method’, if I can glorigy it as such, is to create characters who to some extent led ordinaty lives, and thought that if I could imagine being them I could simply start from there, and follow. I could play ‘what if’ with them. After that I try hard to keep within the broad ‘big bones’ of historical contect. But the books always carry a careful disclaimer – pointing out that facets of place, time, geography and history have been altered in the interest of pace, drama, and clarity. It was a really enlightening conversation, and I hope it illustrates that there are as many types of historical crime fiction as there are of contemporary. (We had a good go at dismantling that idea: how many books have you read that claim to be contempory only to discover their imaginative heart lies in 1970!) So -all three books sounded like wonderful reads. Matthew’s is The New Forest Murders, Julia’s A Death in the Afternoon. I was talking about The Cambridge Siren – the latest Eden Brooke. The paper back is out soon, watch this space.