The Ray is real.
It is a small, low-lying islet in the Blackwater Estuary, just off Mersea Island in Essex, surrounded by salt marsh, mudflats and tidal channels. Today it is a quiet, remote place, but Ray and the surrounding country have a remarkably dark past.
This was smuggling country.
The geography explains much of it. The Essex coast is a maze of creeks, marshes, islands and channels, and the landscape changes dramatically with the tide. The Ray itself can feel almost detached from the mainland. To someone who knew the waterways, it offered innumerable opportunities to land a cargo, conceal it and move it inland. To a Revenue officer arriving from elsewhere, it must have been bewildering.
From the sixteenth century through into the nineteenth, Mersea and the surrounding villages became associated with the smuggling of tea, tobacco, spirits and other heavily taxed goods. The trade was sufficiently profitable to become part of the local economy. Fishermen, farmers, publicans and others could all benefit from contraband arriving through the creeks.
And there were some ingenious places to hide it.
One of my favourite stories concerns the Peldon Rose, the ancient inn just across the Strood from Mersea Island. The pond beside the inn was supposedly used as a hiding place for smuggled goods. According to the local tradition, barrels of spirits could be weighted down and lowered into the pond on ropes while the excise men searched the premises. There was said to be a concealed shaft or false bottom beneath the water, allowing the barrels to be hidden from anyone examining the pond.
I first visited the Peldon Rose during lockdown – which made things tricky because it was all shut up and abandoned, a ghost of an inn. But, perhaps, that fitted with the themes of my novel, which is about how the hungry ghosts of the past can devour the present. Set in France during the French Revolution and Britain 20 years later, the currents of time are forever dragging people under.
The Peldon Rose wasn't an isolated case. Local accounts describe inns and houses throughout the area being used to store illicit goods. The people involved weren't necessarily hardened criminals. Smuggling could involve an entire network of otherwise respectable local people: someone who knew when a boat was coming in, someone who provided a cart, someone who hid a barrel in a cellar, someone who sold the goods on.
But the trade could also be brutally violent.
There is a notorious local story about a group of excise men who came to the Mersea area in search of smugglers. The smugglers, according to the story, deliberately allowed word to spread that a large landing of contraband was about to take place. The Revenue men took the bait. They gathered together and went out in a longboat, expecting to catch the smugglers in the act.
Instead, they were ambushed.
The traditional account says that the smugglers attacked the boat and murdered the excise men, cutting their throats and leaving their bodies. One version says that as many as twenty-four men were killed. The bodies were subsequently said to have been buried beneath an upturned boat in the churchyard at Virley.
Whether every detail has been embroidered by generations of retelling is less interesting than the fact that the story survived at all. It tells you something about the reputation the smugglers acquired – and about how dangerous the battle between the Revenue men and the smugglers could become.
The more I discovered, the more I realised that the landscape around the Ray was almost a ready-made thriller.
And I wasn't the first writer to notice.
Sabine Baring-Gould was rector of East Mersea from 1871 to 1881. He is probably best known today as the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers, but he was an extraordinary polymath: clergyman, folklorist, antiquarian and novelist. During his decade on Mersea he became fascinated by the stories and traditions of the place. His great fictional response was ‘Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes’, published in 1880.
Like my novel, his is a dark, Gothic tale of violence, passion, revenge and smuggling, set around the real landscape of Mersea and the Ray during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Baring-Gould knew the country intimately and used real places and local traditions in the book.
And then there was Margery Allingham.
Long before she became famous for Albert Campion, Allingham was fascinated by Mersea. Her first novel, ‘Blackkerchief Dick’, was published in 1923, when she was only nineteen, and is a historical adventure involving the smugglers of Mersea Island.
I loved discovering this literary succession. The smugglers create the stories; local people preserve them; Baring-Gould, the rector, turns them into Gothic fiction; Allingham turns them into an early crime novel; and eventually I came along and found that the landscape still contained the ingredients I needed.
I wasn't looking for a fictional landscape and then trying to make it seem real. I had the opposite problem. Reality had already done most of the work.
The Riptide by Gareth Rubin is published by Simon & Schuster (Out Now)
A dazzling, puzzle-box mystery of secrets, power and hidden truths. 1804, Isle of Ray, Essex. Lysander Rose has spent his life searching for the truth about his mother, abducted when he was just a baby. When the men who took her return for him, Lysander is forced to flee – leaving behind everything he knows. But in his escape, he uncovers a clue that draws him into the orbit of a secretive organisation known only as the Circle. As Lysander follows the trail from the Essex coast to the shadowed streets of Edinburgh, he finds himself entangled in a world of murder, blackmail and political intrigue. At its centre: an exiled king, and a conspiracy that could shape the fate of nations. And stranger still, the secrets of Lysander’s own past seem to be hidden in the pages of a lurid penny-blood chapbook – a story that may hold the key to who he really is. But as the truth of his origins begins to emerge, Lysander must decide whether he can escape the fate others have written for him.
More information about the author can be found on his website. He can also be found on Facebook and on X@GarethRubin
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