Leonora Nattrass on the Inspiration for Scarlet Town

I am lucky enough to live in a seventeenth-century farmhouse five miles from Helston in West Cornwall. Helston is a beautiful town, if presently fallen on rather hard times like many a high street up and down the land. The buildings on its four main streets are mostly listed, which means that their old architecture is still authentic, if a little shabby, and the church is set on a hill above the town amid shady old streets of immense charm and character.

When I wrote Black Drop, the first in my Laurence Jago series of historical crime mysteries set in the 1790s, it seemed natural to me to make my main character, Laurence, a farmer’s son from my adopted county of Cornwall.

Searching for a name for my main character, I idly looked back through parish records about our own house and its inhabitants, and came across a Marie, a Laurence and a Grace living here in the 1640s. Laurence duly acquired a home in the shape of our own house, a mother named Marie and a sister named Grace. And it was perhaps from these suggestive names that the idea of their being half-French first occurred to me – an idea which seemed plausible enough, given the profitable smuggling trade between Cornwall and France in the eighteenth-century.

This was an idea full of possibilities in the context of the French Revolution raging across the channel, and Laurence working for the British government newly at war with the French republic.

In Black Drop, Laurence lives amid the dust and squalor of eighteenth-century London, working as a clerk to the Foreign Office, but always pining for the peace and beauty of the Cornish countryside. In the sequel, Blue Water, he is even further away from home, aboard a Post Office mail ship bound for Philadelphia. But even here, Cornwall looms large, for Falmouth’s packet ships, manned by Cornish crews, were the means by which news and correspondence spread around the globe. 

Nevertheless, I always wanted to bring Laurence home to Cornwall, and when I discovered the story of the 1790 election in Helston (in the wonderful resource ParliamentaryHistory Online, an ongoing project funded by the Houses of Parliament) I realised it would be a perfect vehicle for Laurence’s third adventure in Scarlet Town.

The true story was preposterous – a real case of truth being stranger than fiction, which is always very satisfactory to a historical crime writer! In the Helston election of 1790, a single octogenarian voter in the town sent two MPs to Westminster. He was the last of six old freemen, whom Parliament had decreed would have the honour of returning the town’s MPs until they all died.

This old voter was firmly in the pocket of the town’s patron, the Duke of Leeds, who told him who to vote for. Riled by this seigneurial arrangement, and rightly thinking the whole situation absurd, the mayor and corporation of the town set up a rival electorate of about thirty men, and, when the general election was called, the town duly split into fierce warring supporters of each side.

Even better from my point of view was the discovery that the mayor and corporation were equally outrageous: locked in terrible family feuds, refusing to accept the results of their own internal elections of aldermen and mayor, flouncing out of meetings, and constantly suing each other in the courts. I always like a world where no one is entirely good, no one is entirely bad, and apparently straightforward moral questions are mired in ambiguity.

Moreover, eighteenth-century elections were gloriously comic affairs too, being a kind of carnival even for those who couldn’t vote – and especially entertaining since there was no such thing as a secret ballot, and every voter was obliged to announce his choice in public, to the hoots – and possible physical retribution – of his opponents. Wild, libellous accusations of wrongdoing were rife, along with obscene but very funny songs, especially if ladies chose to involve themselves in the hustings. “If for the Man of the People you’ll poll/You may tickle a Duchess’s tol de rol lol,” they sang in the Westminster election of 1784 – a song I shamelessly stole and reworded for Scarlet Town.

Moving the election to 1796 when Laurence returned to Cornwall from America – and adding Toby, the “Sapient” fortune-telling Hog, along with a juicy murder – set the stage for Laurence to begin a new adventure at home in Cornwall, among the beautiful streets which he and I know and love so well.

Scarlet Town by Leonora Nattrass is out now (Viper, £16.99)

1796. A rigged election. A town at war. A murderer at large. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's hometown of Helston, Cornwall, in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. But it is no easy matter, thanks to the machinations of the rival political factions, not to mention the riotous performances of Toby the Sapient Hog. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands.

Western Approaches with Graham Hurley

Graham Hurley is the author 12 novels in the critically acclaimed Portsmouth-set series featuring Detective Inspector Faraday and Detective Sargent Winter, which are noted for their realistic portrayal of contemporary Britain and especially Portsmouth. Embarking on a new series, Western Approaches is a spin off from this series and features D/S Suttle, and is set in the West Country.

Leaving Pompey (aka Portsmouth), fictionally or otherwise, was never going to be easy.  In the real world,  we packed the cat,  a couple of potted plants,  a witch and a trillion books into our ancient camper,  lodged the key with a neighbour,  and headed west (the rest of our stuff had already gone).  Nearly thirty years in this extraordinary city had bred a deep affection for its rough charms and as we passed Dorchester, I remember wondering whether we had made the right decision.  For better or worse, places like Pompey spark story after story.  Was it really wise to abandon all this?

Back then, in 2008, the Faraday series still had three books to go.  These were complex novels with multi-layered plots, full of the mayhem and clamour that went with 200,000 souls banged up on the flatness of Portsea Island.  Feral kids camping in the spooky darkness of a derelict cinema.  Single mums stealing a living from the chillier cabinets of local supermarkets and flogging bacon joints round the inner city estates.  The constant drumbeat of tribal warfare, as local gangs jostled for advantage.  A city apart:  complex, bewildering, but always rich in fictional possibilities.  Once the series was finally put to bed, where was I going to turn next?

In principle, the solution seemed obvious.  The USP of the Faraday books – their trademark, if you like – had always been their authenticity.  I had spent a lot of time and effort getting alongside working cops and this investment had paid off in spades in terms of both reviews and sales.  However, after a nearly a decade in print, my two lead cops were fast approaching retirement, and if for no other reason, I had to find a new direction if I was to remain a crime writer.  So why not ship one of my younger cops west?  Why not bring him down to Devon, along with the cat and the potted plants?

By now, I was deep into Book 10, Beyond Reach.  With a brand new series in mind, I began to give young D/S Jimmy Suttle more room on the page.  He was barely 30.  He had just got married.  He had a child on the way.  And as the star apprentice of rogue cop D/C Paul Winter, he was full of potential mischief.

There was, however, a problem.  That first summer in East Devon, I am glad to report, was blissful.  No stoned babies.  No packs of paedo-hunting kids.  In addition, when strangers said good morning on the seafront, you never wondered whether they were taking the piss.  This novel glimpse of a very different lifestyle did wonders for my blood pressure but as the months went by, I began to stress about the challenge of turning all this rich contentment into page-turning drama.

Orion, my publishers, had the same doubts.  When I first mentioned the possibility of a spin-off series set in leafy Devon, their eyes rolled.  Crime fiction was getting uglier and more brutal by the week.  Cream teas?  Thatched cottages?  Happiness?  Just how noir was all that?

I told them they were wrong.  A single force polices both Devon and Cornwall.  The sheer range of locations – and thus fictional possibilities - is vast:  the gritty urban angst of Plymouth,   beleaguered up-country hill farmers, beset by poverty and generations of inbreeding, the tatty remains of the English Riviera awash with Scouse drug dealers,   West Country fishermen, tied hand and foot by EU regulations.  This, I assured Orion, would offer young Jimmy Suttle the caseload of his dreams.  Forget London.  Think outside the box.

But then something strange happened.  Lin and I joined the local offshore rowing club.  Twice a week, with a bunch of madcap ex-Marines (and a cop), we tackled vast distances and had a lot of fun.  Neither of us had been in a club before.  And the swirl of stuff going on beneath the surface was a revelation.

At the same time, Simon Spanton – my editor – had begun to warm to the idea of books set in the West Country.  The Faraday novels had developed into a portrait of a single English city, seen through the eyes of both the cops and the bad guys, set over an entire decade.  In ways I had never planned, they had a lot to say about the state of our embattled nation.  The new departure needed a quite different mission statement.  So how about a series exploring the contemporary pressures on a young marriage?

This, I knew at once, was an excellent idea.  I have always been fanatical about the small print of everyday life.  Look any stranger in the eyes, establish a rapport, tease out his (or her) story, and you will be amazed where life leads people.  In this sense, our new adopted home was like any other community:  full of hidden potential.

And thus, Western Approaches came to pass.  It is based, to no one’s surprise, on our local rowing club.  It features a sus death that only Jimmy Suttle believes is murder.  It is a country mile from the busy complex violence of the Faraday novels, and it may not be what hard-bitten crime fans are expecting, but early reactions have been more than positive.  Touching Distance, the second book, is now done:  a trail of serial killings that stretch Suttle and his mates to their limits. 

Enjoy?  Here’s hoping…

Western Approaches - D/S Jimmy Suttle has finally tired of the relentless struggle against the rising tide of urban crime in Portsmouth.  Surely, a job in Major Crimes in the West Country will offer some respite? He finds a remote cottage nestled in a fold of Dartmoor and, with his wife and two-year-old daughter; heads west for what he is sure will be a saner existence.  How wrong could he be?  Soon he is investigating the murder of a long-distance rower in the small town of Exmouth. The man rowed in the same 5-man boat as a man who, two years before, dodged a murder charge when his wife went missing during a cross Atlantic rowing challenge. There had been tensions between the two.  Has a killer killed again?

As the job takes over, Lizzie, Suttle's wife, is increasingly unhappy about the move. Trying to juggle family life with her own new job on a local paper, isolated in a lonely cottage with a demanding toddler and struggling to make new friends, Lizzie thought the whole point of the move was that she and Suttle could at least see more of each other.
As his marriage frays at the edges and his first investigation becomes mired Suttle begins to feel the hills around their cottage crowding in, the wind over the moors above ever chillier, the waters ever greyer. He really has reached land's end...

More information about Graham Hurley and his writing can be found on his website.