East Anglia: The Scene of the Crime Books That Made Britain

When you think of East Anglia, there are the huge skies,

the wind sweeping through these flat landscapes

and also the constant battle

as the sometimes menacing sea tries to reclaim the land.

This part of the country can seem remote and mysterious.

There are isolated communities, sometimes with dark secrets.

Many of our top crime writers have chosen it

as the backdrop for their stories.

Authors like PD James, Ruth Rendell and Dorothy L Sayers

have set some of their most popular work here.

I'll be trying to discover why this beautiful,

but sometimes bleak landscape,

has come to inspire quite so many of our crime writers

and how in turn their books have helped shaped

our image of this place.

That's not a real crime scene, by the way,

just a bit of dramatic licence.

For an area which in real life has a very low crime rate,

an extraordinary number of fictional corpses

have washed up on these shores.

Our journey spans more than 80 years

and starts in the flat fenlands of the 1930s.

Crime writer Dorothy L Sayers grew up

in the tiny Fenland village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith.

It was the remote communities and landscape around her

which inspired some of her classic 1930s mysteries,

including probably her best known,

The Nine Tailors.

I've always had a bit of crush

on Dorothy L Sayers' suave, aristocratic detective,

Lord Peter Wimsey.

In The Nine Tailors, after a car accident in a ditch,

he finds himself in a remote fenland village.

This is a story of an unsolved crime

and its violent unravelling, two decades later.

"Mile after mile, the flat road reeled away behind them.

"Here a windmill, there a solitary farmhouse,

"there a row of poplars strung along the edge of a reed-grown dyke

"and as they went, the land flattened more and more,

"if a flatter flatness were possible."

CHURCH BELLS RING

This church in Terrington St Clement was the inspiration

for the fictional one Sayers used in The Nine Tailors.

The mystery involves the theft of a valuable emerald necklace.

A central part of the plot involves bell-ringing.

A secret message and clue to the identity of the murderer

is hidden among the bells.

Nearly 60 years after Sayers' death,

the author has a very active appreciation society.

They regularly meet and visit locations featured in her books.

Why do you think The Nine Tailors has remained so popular?

I think it's a very well-written book.

I know that sounds obvious, but I think it's very well written.

I think it evokes this landscape

that we are in part of at the moment, brilliantly.

And that anybody reading it would, I think, really enjoy it.

It's a fascinating story as well.

It's a bit different from many just ordinary murder stories.

What is it, do you think, about this landscape

that made Dorothy L Sayers think

it would be a great place to set a murder mystery?

I think that there is a sense of landscape,

sometimes about desolation,

of alienation, of sadness

that maybe inspired her.

I don't know. That's what I think anyway.

And we get a very good idea of the Fens from the beginning of the book.

Yes, and hearing about the drive through the countryside

and taking things a little too quickly for safety.

It's all those kinds of things,

that you feel she really knew the roads,

she knew where they were going,

she had an idea of the sorts of things that can happen

and yet somehow she keeps you on the edge of your seat,

wanting to know what's going to happen next.

I really love the way that Dorothy L Sayers just immersed herself

in this landscape and she writes in painstaking detail

about how the fens themselves were created.

Centuries ago, this land was drained,

which means that some of it is still below sea level,

as you can see right down there, and in fact,

if there weren't miles and miles of flood banks and drainage pumps,

an awful lot of what you see around me would be under water.

The dramatic climax of The Nine Tailors features a massive flood

as the drainage system is overpowered by a storm.

Just a few years after Sayers wrote the book,

life would tragically mimic art.

In 1953, a huge tidal surge

left much of this part of the country under water

and more than 100 people died.

"Another thunderous crash brought down the weir across the 30-foot

"in a deluge of tossing timbers.

"Beams and barges were whirled together like straws

"and a great spout of water raged over the bank

"and flung itself across the road."

The fenland that Sayers portrays so accurately is still recognisable.

Today, it's the responsibility of the Environment Agency

to manage this man-made landscape.

The birds and the wild flowers here are just fantastic.

And it's so strange to think

that this landscape was all created by mankind.

500 years ago, what would this place have looked like?

The area we're in now would have been under water continuously.

We wouldn't have the banks and the wildlife we see here today.

So it would be part of the sea?

Yes, the sea would have come in quite a distance inland,

probably past here and also we would have been inundated

every time it rained as well,

so it would have been sitting in a basin continuously.

The constant threat of flooding adds tension throughout the book.

Sayers give the landscape of the Fens its own personality.

"In its own limited, austere and almost grudging fashion,

"the fen acknowledged the return of the sun.

"The floods withdrew from the pasture,

"the wheat lifted its pale green spears

"more sturdily from the black soil."

The most successful crime novelists recognise

that landscape and location are key in any successful book,

perhaps more so in crime fiction than any other genre.

This is the University of East Anglia,

home to the world-renowned creative-writing department,

where the crime authors of tomorrow are learning their craft.

Had, for instance, Dorothy L Sayers

not have been born in the Fens,

had her father not been a rural rector,

had, say, she been born in London or Edinburgh,

what might have happened?

I would suspect she would have still written those sorts of crime novels,

but with completely different settings.

I think, in crime, it's because the setting is intrinsically linked,

because it determines what the crime is

and also, who's going to investigate it,

whether there is a detective

or whether it's a kind of murder

or just a petty theft, you know, kind of family drama.

So it doesn't matter how civilised, how ordered the place is,

I mean, a crime will change the setting in itself.

Of all literary genres,

setting, landscape, environment

are the most important within the crime genre.

Why? Because they determine the mood, the tone of a novel.

Many writers, many critics, think of setting, landscape,

environment in relation to the genre as being another character.

It is as important as that.

Indeed, in many ways it is more important than the character,

it is the most determining, controlling factor within the genre.

Henry Sutton not only teaches creative writing,

he's also a successful crime writer himself.

And, like Dorothy L Sayers,

he chooses to set his stories in the place where he grew up.

"Murder comes in all shapes and sizes.

"Over the years, I've incorporated

"many other areas of criminal behaviour, too.

"Racketeering, blackmail, extortion,

"fraud, arson, theft, kidnapping and so on,

"but there always has to be a murder or a suspicious death."

My Criminal World is set

in the fictional seaside town of Kingsmouth.

In reality, it's based on

the Norfolk holiday resort of Great Yarmouth.

It's about an author who's busy writing a crime story

while his own life is in crisis.

It's a book within a book

and of course, there's a nasty murder or two.

When you're walking around places,

do you find you get ideas for books?

Most definitely, but what I suppose really, er...

spurs an idea is something visual rather than actually...

You know, if I'm sort of static, looking out at something.

So the spot we're in now, for instance,

I came upon it from my car which I'd parked over there,

and I looked out towards the dunes and then the sea

and then obviously the wind farm

and one way or another, my mind, you know, I was thinking,

this is possibly the prettiest bit,

the most wild, untamed part of Great Yarmouth, these lovely dunes here.

There's lovely wild flowers everywhere, actually.

Thick marram grass. And I thought, what can I do with it?

This is an area that's been designated

of outstanding natural beauty,

so, to me, I thought the most dramatic thing I can do about it

is put in, right in the centre here,

perhaps over there, a badly mutilated, naked corpse.

SHE LAUGHS

You see, that's not what I would do

when I come to an area of natural beauty!

-No.

-But that's the crime writer's mind, isn't it?

-Well...

It's about being dramatic, I think, and it's also about using extremes.

-So you have the contrast.

-You have the contrast, and somewhere like

Great Yarmouth, I think, is a place that's absolutely full of extremes.

And you look at this place and you think, why isn't it

one of the most extraordinary resorts in the east coast?

Why is it so deprived?

Which actually, it is.

And then you move a bit closer into town

and you get to see more and more deprivation.

You know, why has that happened?

And for me, as a writer,

I find it absolutely fascinating, this contrast,

and in a way that's what I have always been actually taken with.

"A minute or so on and Jones had cleared the dunes

"and was out on the pebbly beach,

"having reached the high-tide mark, a thick line of drying seaweed

"and stonewashed plastic rubbish.

"There was a faint smell of rotting fish and tar."

Why is it you think that East Anglia has become

a kind of mecca for crime writers?

Just look at the sky, look at the sea,

um...it's almost hard to see where they meet, isn't it?

It's pretty oppressive, or can be.

It's lonely, it's isolating,

it's also thought-provoking.

It's simply dramatic, I think, as a setting.

And I suppose, in a way, it's slightly similar

to the kind of landscapes we see in Scandinavian crime programmes

and read about in novels.

Yeah. You know, just a short way across the North Sea,

they are our kindred crime spirits, there's no doubt about that.

This, to me, feels like Henning Mankell, it feels like...

or even The Bridge, The Killing.

There is a real closeness, the kindred sense of crime space.

"Glancing up at the massive chimney of the redundant power station,

"clouds bunching, gulls swirling,

"he'd grown to like this town,

"like the way it was sandwiched

"between a wide, fast-flowing river and the sea,

"how it was out on a limb,

"vulnerable, helpless.

"Hopeless."

Whether it's the coastal town or fenland village,

it's the isolation and edginess we keep coming back to

and that's something author PD James played with brilliantly.

Her famous fictional character was the detective Adam Dalgliesh.

Several of his investigations took place

just a short boat ride from Great Yarmouth.

For most of us, this would be just a lovely day out at sea.

But in the dark imagination of PD James,

a boat like this becomes the final resting place

for a corpse with its hands cut off.

She loved the isolation of this place

and you can see just how precarious the coastline is,

the way the sea erodes it.

And it's almost as if the land and the sea are fused into one.

It's a liminal landscape, the perfect setting for a mystery.

Storms are common here.

It's not unusual for homes to be swept into the sea.

This natural erosion

and its impact on the lives of people who live here,

feature heavily in PD James's book Unnatural Causes.

"It was hard to believe, thought Dalgliesh,

"that one was looking at a battlefield

"where for nearly nine centuries

"that land had waged its losing fight against the sea.

"Hard to realise

"that under that deceptive calm of veined water

"lay the nine drowned churches of old Dunwich."

Dunwich was a real place

and what's left of it lies just a few feet below this very water.

800 years ago, it was the capital of East Anglia

and an international port,

at its height, rivalling 14th-century London.

But violent storms and erosion have swept it all away.

Not so far from here is the area of Minsmere,

which you may know from Spring Watch

as an extremely peaceful wildlife reserve.

Not in the imagination of PD James.

She changed the name to Monksmere Head

and a murderer's on the loose

amongst the small community of writers which live there.

The setting for me is tremendously important.

And nearly always the book begins with a setting.

WH Auden said that it should be the great, good place.

He wanted contrast between the setting and the murder

and he said it should shock in the same way

as when a dog makes a mess on the drawing-room carpet.

That was the words he used.

Nothing on this coast is static

and James uses this to create a sense of foreboding.

Sometimes, the drowned graveyards yield up bones onto the beach,

a macabre idea which rather appealed to PD James.

The closed, remote communities you get in this part of the world

provided rich material for many of her books.

The wild coast of Suffolk was the perfect setting.

"Here was nothing but sea, sky and marshland,

"an empty beach with little to mark the miles of outspate shingle

"but the occasional tangle of tar-splotched driftwood

"and the rusting spikes of old fortifications."

PD James loved this area and had a home just a few miles away.

As you might imagine, her stories are of particular interest

to people who live around here.

These women are all members of a local book club.

So, how well do you think PD James described this landscape,

this part of the world, which you must know very well?

It's... Part of the description of the atmosphere is very good,

but the actual locations aren't necessarily the same

and maybe it's because there's a lot of erosion around here

and a lot of the cliffs have actually fallen into the sea!

So things which might have been the headland

perhaps aren't the headland any more.

Why do you think so many crime writers have been attracted

to this part of the world?

I think we're lucky, actually, for having such a lot of variety.

In just this strip of coast, we've got marshes,

we've got clifftop, heath,

we've got the bird reserve, we've got the forests,

it's just amazing in terms of the difference.

And there are lots of places

where one could actually do a murder and hide somebody!

And I like the way that the sea is giving up its secrets as well,

so the corpse washes up in the boat

and then bones wash up here as well, don't they?

Well, frequently. Almost, if you kept looking at this cliff

and came down after another storm,

it's not unknown to find an arm bone sticking out or whatever.

And the lady in the museum said she had an old man who came in

who said, when they were boys, if they found a skull,

they used it as a football!

Which is absolutely horrendous!

I'm beginning to understand why this is such a macabre part of the world,

-using skulls as footballs!

-I know, horrid, isn't it?

"Dalgliesh loved this emptiness,

"this fusion of sea and sky.

"But today, the place held no peace for him.

"He saw it suddenly with new eyes.

"A shore alien, eerie, utterly desolate."

PD James couldn't resist tapping into the dark underbelly

beneath the sunny, idyllic veneer of the Suffolk coastline.

She died in 2014.

But the murderous character of the East Anglian landscape

is being kept alive

by two of today's most successful crime writers.

-What's your name?

-Judy.

Judy. So, with a Y?

It's the Felixstowe Book Festival

and a husband and wife crime-writing team are here

to talk about and sign their new book.

The couple, who live in Suffolk,

have co-written more than 20 bestsellers

under the pen name Nicci French.

I think Saturday is quite...

There's a kind of darkness.

You have to feel the storm is gathering, really.

One of their most successful books is Losing You.

The story is set among an isolated community

living on a fictional island called Sandling.

In reality, it's actually Mersea Island, off the Essex coast.

"Here on Sandling Island, it was all horizon.

"The level land, the mudflats,

"the miles of marshes, the saltings,

"the grey, wrinkled sea."

The first book we wrote that was based in Suffolk

was before we actually moved here.

And maybe was one of the reasons we came here,

because we explored it for this book

and got to know it and then came here.

But it's certainly true

there are certain books we've written which are so located

in a particular environment, the coastal Suffolk,

the kind of mud flats.

Birds crying out and shingle and grey seas.

There are certain thrillers we write

which need a kind of haunted, empty landscape.

I think there's something about

living, looking out to sea, rather than back inland,

so people who live looking away from where they're living,

kind of people who live on the edge.

And also, it feels it's full of forgotten places.

That feels quite a kind of fruitful area for crime fiction.

And also, you know, the areas that we have placed books around here,

it's not golden beaches and blue skies and tourists.

It's like the kind of...a lot of it's unpicturesque, deserted...

-Bleak, desolate.

-The wind blowing in.

In the story, the Landry family are about to go on holiday

when teenage daughter Charlie goes missing.

Told over a period of just a day,

it's about mum Nina's frantic search

to discover what's happened to her daughter.

Once again, it's the edginess

of this flat, watery landscape that creates tension.

"The last time I'd walked past the hulks, it had been in early October.

"I remembered it clearly. The tide had been low then,

"the hulks lay in a massed huddle on the mud.

"There had been dozens of noisy, cheerful gulls

"perched on the smashed decks.

"Now, the tide was high

"and vicious little waves riffled round the hulls."

For ages, we had an idea of writing a book

about a mother losing her daughter,

a kind of basic story of a parent's worst nightmare.

But we couldn't think of how to turn it

into a really different kind of thriller

until we came to Mersea Island.

I remember when we walked around here,

it just felt unbelievably perfect

because it's this contained island,

which is part of Britain, but it's cut off once a day.

The tide comes over the causeway.

-We set it on the shortest day of the year.

-Shortest day of the year.

So we had this sense that the tide was rising,

the island was getting cut off,

darkness was closing in and then we wrote a book

that actually is in real time and that has no chapters either,

so it's this sense of absolute claustrophobia,

everything closing down.

And once we had all of that, then we could write.

-Yeah.

-Then we could write a book.

So it's the landscape made the thriller.

It was the landscape that turned... that gave us the plot almost.

And when we saw these sort of whatever they are,

kind of hulks, houseboats, we knew they would play an important part

in the story and we actually shifted them to another part of the island

that's a little bit more desolate, using our creative licence

and we knew that Nina, our heroine,

was going to find something really nasty inside one of them.

"I used to love Sandling Island at night.

"The silence, the slap and murmur of water, the smell of salt and mud,

"the chime of halyards and the forlorn cry of birds.

"Now, it terrified me."

Throughout their book, the couple take inspiration

from what they observed walking around Mersea island.

Sometimes, the most unlikely things are used in a very dramatic way,

as mum Nina continues searching for her daughter.

I think it was about halfway through the book

we had this crucial scene at the beach hut.

And what we really wanted to do was take the idea of Nina

being full of rising wildness and breaking lots of boundaries.

So we took these rather pretty little domestic spaces

in a public place and we have her smashing into them with a mallet.

She does them one by one, at night-time,

just going through, splintering open the doors.

One of the great things about writing a book rather than making a film,

is you're free just to find this lovely landmark here

and just smash them, one after another, which I think would be

a bit of a problem if you were actually going to film it.

But it was...rather satisfying as she broke taboo after taboo.

And there's this sense that behind these lovely little English doors,

-there might be a dead body or someone kept captive.

-Yes, yes.

Something else the Frenches spotted while exploring Mersea Island

was this derelict Second World War observation post.

It became the setting for the book's dramatic ending.

The character Nina finally discovers

what's happened to her kidnapped daughter.

I remember we came on this beach on the day where the story was set.

We had this sense that if the tide was rising

and the island was getting cut off and time was running out,

we had to end it at a place

where it mattered that the tide was rising,

where it was just kind of crucial

that every inch the water crept up was an inch more dangerous.

Also, I think one of the problems we faced is,

on a kind of really little island and someone has disappeared,

where can you actually hide someone

on a little island by the sea, on the beach?

It may even have been this particular lump of concrete,

-which I think is the remains of a...

-There are pillboxes all the way

around the island, so we probably envisaged a more intact pillbox,

-but then placed it here.

-And that seemed perfect.

Inside a pillbox, with the tide coming up,

gradually filling with water.

That just felt like the kind of...

And that was a total example, I think,

of how the story and place and character play off each other.

"A boggy path that led to the treacherous marshes

"and borrow dykes. To the left, the road ran along the low,

"subsiding cliffs, then turned inland again, away from the cliffs,

"the dykes, the land that slid and melted

"into silted mud and salty water and back towards the causeway."

For me, the power of all the stories

we've explored, is that they're rooted in real places.

The most successful crime writers know how to use the extremes

and play with the contrast between beauty and desolation

to make it work for them.

The land of East Anglia itself becomes a player in the drama.

You've heard about our crime novels,

but what are the books that you'd like to recommend?

Do share your suggestions using the hashtag #lovetoread

and you can see what other books people are talking about.