All the events from Noirwich 2020 and 2021 are available online and can be watched below.
2020 was a challenging year for everyone and we’re very grateful to the artists and audiences who helped make this year’s online festival such a success.
We are delighted to welcome award-winning US author and screenwriter Attica Locke for the annual Noirwich Lecture, in which she explores the ways that crime writing can challenge the distribution of power and authority at a structural and individual level. Drawing on examples from her own career and writing, including the Highway 59 novels, she reflects on how stories and characters can pull back the veil on some forms of hidden power.
Attica’s most recent novel, Heaven, My Home, is an expertly-crafted thriller mystery, but also a sharp examination of ‘Trump-era’ America and issues of race, power, prejudice and white supremacy which still exist today. Her recent work as a television writer and producer includes When They See Us (Netflix); a portrayal of the 1990 wrongful conviction of five teenage boys from Harlem for a brutal attack in Central Park; and Little Fires Everywhere (Amazon Prime).
The lecture is followed by a live Q&A with Attica and Nathan Ashman, Lecturer in Crime Writing at the University of East Anglia.
“Even if I couldn’t sell a book, I’d still be writing.”
The Noirwich Crime Writing Festival continues with Anita Terpstra joining us from Leeuwarden in the Netherlands to discuss her crime writing. Talking with Flo Reynolds on the National Centre for Writing’s The Writing Life podcast, Anita reveals her path to becoming published and how keeping the faith and continuing to write are essential. It’s an inspiring and positive conversation.
Check out yesterday’s pod with Paddy Richardson if you missed it and keep an eye on your podcast feed for our Hercule Poirot special this Sunday, featuring Sophie Hannah and Dr Mark Aldridge. Noirwich 2020 is packed full of amazing live videos, including appearances from Attica Locke, Oyinkan Braithwaite and Olivier Norek. Full details over on the programme page.
You can find the short stories by Anita over on the blog: https://noirwich.co.uk/news/
Hosted by Steph McKenna and Simon Jones.
You can go direct to the RSS feed here.
Photo by Harry Cock.
Music by Bennet Maples.
“I was told very severely that ‘being a journalist is not something that women did.'”
Noirwich 2020 has begun! We kick off with a podcast interview with Paddy Richardson, one of our ‘virtual’ writers in residence. Paddy is talking from Dunedin in New Zealand to Peggy Hughes on the National Centre for Writing’s The Writing Life podcast.
Paddy Richardson is the author of two collections of short stories and seven novels. Traces of Red and Cross Fingers were long-listed for the Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Award and Hunting Blind and Swimming in the Dark were shortlisted. Through the Lonesome Dark was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Novel Award and longlisted for The Dublin International Literature Award.
Paddy has been awarded Creative New Zealand Awards, the University of Otago Burns Fellowship, the Beatson Fellowship and the James Wallace Arts Trust Residency Award. She has been a guest at many writing festivals and was one of the New Zealand writer representatives at both the Leipzig and Frankfurt Book Fairs in 2012 when New Zealand was the guest of honour. In 2019, she was awarded the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington where she spent six months writing and researching her latest novel to be published in 2021.
Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.
You can go direct to the RSS feed here.
Read an extract from Swimming in the Dark: https://noirwich.co.uk/swimming-in-the-dark/
Read A Soft Flowing Veil of Grey, an exclusive reflection from Paddy: https://noirwich.co.uk/a-soft-flowing-veil-of-grey/
Music by Bennet Maples.
Noirwich 2019 has come and gone, with hundreds of crime fans arriving in the city for a weekend of crime fiction indulgence. Across four days at Jarrold, the University of East Anglia and Dragon Hall, writers and readers celebrated and explored the genre.
Today we have the first of several highlights from the festival, courtesy of the National Centre for Writing’s podcast. George Alagiah delivered the 2019 Noirwich Lecture, focusing on the relationship between fiction and fact. His first work of fiction, The Burning Land, explores many of the issues he has encountered as a BBC journalist in his career but from an entirely new perspective.
Claire McGowan is the prolific writer of crime fiction including the Paula MacGuire series and the recently release What You Did. Ahead of her workshop during this year’s Noirwich Crime Writing Festival she guested on the National Centre for Writing’s podcast to discuss techniques for crafting characters for crime fiction.
Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.
Music by Bennet Maples.
The Noirwich Crime Writing Festival returns this September with a new line-up of renowned crime writers. A limited number of Season Passes are now available, with individual event tickets to go on sale in June.
Headliners for 2019 include George Alagiah, Louise Doughty and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, each making their first appearance at Noirwich.
George Alagiah is best known as a journalist and broadcaster, easily recognisable from BBC News. This year he makes his crime fiction debut with The Burning Land, set in South Africa, with The Independent noting that “without rhetoric or rancour, his eloquent book places issues in their true context, and frames some of the major moral questions of our time.”
Louise Doughty is the award-winning author of nine novels, including the soon-to-be-published Platform Seven, and has written non-fiction and five plays for radio. Her book Apple Tree Yard was adapted for television in 2017.
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is an Icelandic writer of crime and children’s fiction. Her crime novels have been translated into English by Bernard Scudder, Philip Roughton and Victoria Cribb. We’re excited to be joined by Yrsa in Norwich for this year’s festival.
The Noirwich Crime Writing Festival takes places over four days in September. The full programme will be announced in June, with highlights to include James Runcie, Denise Mina, Lisa Jewell, Sarah Hilary, Martin Walker, Erin Kelly, Leye Adenle, Simone Buchholz, Laura Shepherd-Robinson and more.
Season passes are now available, providing you with access to all author events. Click here to secure your season pass!
Tickets for individual events will be available in June.
Now that Noirwich 2019 has been revealed, we thought we’d take a retrospective look back at last year’s festival. If you’ve never been to Noirwich before this will give you a taste of what to expect in September.
2018 was the fifth Noirwich, bringing the region’s largest annual celebration of crime writing back to the city for four days of author discussions, workshops, readings and signings.
The launch event at Jarrold celebrated the 21st anniversary of Nicci French’s career and the finale to the Frieda Klein series. Nicci is in fact a partnership of married writers Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. You can listen to the event on the National Centre for Writing podcast:
The Noirwich Lecture was delivered by none other than Val McDermid, presented by The Times and The Sunday Times Crime Club. Val needs no introduction and her lecture examined the genre of crime and its role in society. You can listen to the entire lecture here:
Nicola Upson was in town for the weekend and delivered a workshop on the Friday about writing detectives and historical fiction. Noirwich is always about writing crime fiction as much as it is about reading it. We managed to track down Nicola for a separate chat:
Winnie M Li was part of the ‘Writing Wrongs’ panel, alongside Eva Dolan and Mari Hannah, discussing how crime fiction can help us to make sense of the world and process personal trauma and tragedy. Winnie joined Elspeth Latimer on the podcast to delve into the subject:
Every year at Noirwich we have a focus on debut authors, as discovering new voices is critical to the continual evolution of the genre. One of our ‘Killer Debuts’ in 2018 was Amer Anwar, who spoke to us about the challenges of finishing his first novel:
The Sunday drew a huge audience for the Death in Paradise conversation with series creator Robert Thorogood, who shared fascinating insight into the process of having the show commissioned and how it has evolved over the years:
Matt Wesolowski was discussing adaptation and talked to us about the notion of ‘hybrid’ writing’. His novels incorporate transcripts from podcasts and audio interviews, disrupting many of the conventions of both the genre and what we think of as a novel. Here’s Matt on the National Centre for Writing podcast:
The weekend was rounded off by Noirwich Live, an evening of short readings from local authors, competitions and a chat with Elizabeth Haynes. Elizabeth was talking about her latest book The Murder of Harriet Monckton. Elizabeth is a fascinating writer who uses the annual write-a-thon NaNoWriMo as a way to kickstart her projects. We talked to her about writing 50,000 words in a month as well as her latest book:
Every year we see new writers and new audiences at Noirwich, all sharing a love of the crime genre. We look forward to Noirwich 2019, with headliners George Alagiah, Louise Doughty and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Season passes are now available!
This week we have an interview with author Winnie M Li, writer of the novel Dark Chapter which was described by the Guardian as “a defiant retelling of personal trauma.” Winnie also wrote an article for us about activism and literature – keep scrolling to read it!
Please note that this episode discusses assault, which some listeners may find distressing.
Asking the questions this week is Elspeth Latimer, a UEA postgraduate researcher in crime fiction who worked on the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival with us, courtesy of a CHASE (Consortium of the Humanities and Arts South-East England) placement.
Hosted by Simon Jones, writer and Digital Marketing Manager at the National Centre for Writing.
Winnie M Li discusses whether novels can be a creative and effective way of exploring and drawing attention to important issues – and is fiction better at doing this than non-fiction?
When you live through a trauma, and that trauma changes your life — And when you realise that trauma is actually part of a much larger societal problem, then as a writer, it becomes vital to write about it. Or at least that’s how it was for me.
My debut novel Dark Chapter is a fictional retelling of something that happened to me ten years ago: I was followed by a stranger in a park outside of Belfast, and I was violently assaulted and raped. At the time, it was very much a matter of survival for me — not just during the attack itself, but in the months and years that followed. I felt isolated, cast adrift, often hopeless I would ever recover.
Along the way, I learned that sexual violence is actually something many people suffer: approximately one in five women become victims. And as I gradually became an activist around this issue, I realised how much readers need a novel that truly testifies to the survivor’s experience — the horror and the injustice of it all — while also showing a path towards recovery. I wanted to show how ill-equipped the criminal justice system can be for victims. And If I could tell this story in the form of a compelling crime novel, then I could not only engage readers through the twists and turns of a plot, but also place them in the shoes of both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime. Through my characters, I could do justice to the experience of injustice.
Writing as a means of demonstrating injustice has long been an impetus for many a novelist. From Charles Dickens’ exposé of debtors’ prisons and the urban poor in Victorian London, to Harper Lee’s child-framed view of racism in the American South, novels have always been an important way of exploring societal inequalities. Would we call this writing a form of activism? I suppose it’s up to the individual writer which word they want to use. But I’d say yes, these types of novels very much have activism at their root.
However, we often picture activism as being very in-your-face: protestors brandishing signs, shouting collective chants, chaining themselves to gates. Novels are more subtle. Instead of yelling angrily at you, novels win you over by investing you emotionally into the life of a character who might be suffering through injustice. They dramatise the human experience behind a larger problem, render that experience lived-in and relatable for readers.
This is why fiction, with its immersion into the mind of a character, can have an edge over non-fiction, which carries a duty to presenting actual, proven fact. Fiction also has a plot which can keep readers riveted. And it’s more likely to appeal to the general public. Not many people would want to pick up a treatise about squalor in Victorian debtors’ prisons. But peopled with Dickens’ colourful characters and an intriguing plot, that unjust, dangerous world can come alive in a novel. So by writing fiction around a form of injustice, we can reach a wider audience, and raise a greater awareness about what needs to change.
I’m really looking forward to discussing this in greater depth with two fantastic crime writers Eva Dolan and Mari Hannah at Noirwich this year. Through our novels, we all touch on ways in which society could be better at handling issues like violence, mental health, inequality, gender. Come along on September 15th to ‘Writing Wrongs’ and join in the conversation — after all, change can’t happen without a dialogue first.
Matt Wesolowski is the author of Six Stories and was at Noirwich 2018 on the Books, Box Sets, Big Screens panel alongside Jane Lythell and Nicola Upson. Here he discusses the term ‘hybrid writer’ and how he incorporates new forms into his storytelling.
I often get described as a hybrid writer. That’s an apt description; stylistically I’m like any writer. I’m a semblance of bits, a crucible of influences. I’m more jumble sale in a village hall than high end fusion cookery but there you have it. I’m not really a crime writer. Not a proper horror writer either. I’m a hybrid.
When I was young I read everything and anything I liked the look of. I remember feeling bemused by a girl in school who asked me (rather witheringly) why I always read ‘girls’ books’. We were in year eight. I never understood what she meant; I still don’t. Mind you, she was the same girl who wished me a ‘terrible future’ in my end of year book. I get the feeling she’s probably not a fan.
Limiting yourself to books that are only of a certain label or genre makes little sense. I often hear people say they like to read ‘trash’ on holiday. I don’t know what that means either. Why would you go and read a book that isn’t good? That didn’t do something to you emotionally? I don’t get it.
It’s the same with the ways of storytelling. I’ve always loved the idea of different formats within the same book. That’s when hybrids start to form; odd shapes shambling out of our brains and into the world. I studied Linguistics at university and have always been fascinated by how our language evolves; how patois and dialect find their way into our lexicon, become standard, forcing older words into archaisms. I feel that fiction does the same thing. I love it when an author slips in some form from the modern era. It feels almost taboo; a strange hybrid brought to life. I remember seeing Lauren Beukes use Reddit threads in Broken Monsters, Paul Tremblay using blogs in A Head Full of Ghosts – the thrill it gave me, how relevant it was. How perfect. I loved it.
Technology gives us new ways to tell stories. As a species, we have always told stories. Podcasts are a new way we tell stories and that’s why I wanted to use this form, to make this hybrid of audio and literature. Writing a book in the form of a podcast wasn’t difficult, it felt new, it felt exciting, it felt taboo. I didn’t even know if it would work. My own hybrid creature unleashed from the lab.
I’m sure there are some who hate literature being tainted by new formats, who see fiction as a sacred cow, an untouchable art form that should not be sullied by the frivolity of modernity. I feel like the emergence of new ways of storytelling will always play a huge part in what I write. So long as a story is being told effectively, so long as it’s relevant, for me it’s valid.
But there will always be people who will shun a hybrid, will drive the monster from their village. I imagine they’re the same types that tell boys they can’t read ‘girls’ books’ and read ‘trash’ on holiday.
Or maybe I’m a weird creature with a terrible future…
On episode 18 of the National Centre for Writing’s podcast, crime writer Nicola Upson discusses the history of crime fiction and writing a historical detective series without it being old fashioned.
Hosted by Simon Jones, writer and Digital Marketing Manager at the National Centre for Writing, and recorded at Noirwich 2018.
Val McDermid delivered the annual lecture at the 2018 Noirwich Crime Writing Festival, on the subject of “What we really talk about when we talk about crime fiction”.
As well as being a legendary crime author, Val is also one of this year’s Man Booker Prize judges, and her lecture examines where crime fiction sits in the wider literature scene and how it relates to society and the real world.
The Noirwich Lecture is presented by The Times and Sunday Times Crime Club.
Hosted by Simon Jones, writer and Digital Marketing Manager at the National Centre for Writing.
Leo Benedictus was at the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival in 2018 to talk about breaking rules and pushing boundaries alongside Jacob Ross and Louise Welsh. Here he muses on the importance of genre definitions – or the lack thereof.
There is a little speech I find myself giving, when someone asks what kind of books I write. “Publishers call it literary fiction,” I say. “It basically means novels that aren’t thrillers, or romances, or sci-fi, or something else. It’s the stuff that doesn’t sell.” I spare us both the embarrassment of what “literary fiction” really means. It means I think I’m an artist.
So when my second novel, Consent, went out to publishers, I was surprised that people started calling it “a thriller”. In retrospect, I am surprised I was surprised. The book tells the story of a stalker and his victim. I meant it to be very frightening. I’ve not read many thrillers, but the resemblance should not have been hard to see. Nor was it unwelcome, altogether. If Consent could be called a thriller, it seemed I might be better paid for it, so I kept my surprise to myself. Now I’m booked to speak at a crime writing festival. These things get quickly out of hand.
Some people say that only snobbery preserves a distinction between literary fiction and the rest. I don’t agree. I think the distinction is clear. It just isn’t very useful – and is frequently misused – because it describes something you can’t see on the page. Literariness is an intention. It exists only in the minds of authors, a mysterious place, especially for authors themselves.
Because when writing a novel, you face one question above all others. Why am I doing this? Is it for readers, or for myself? Both, may be the answer you want to give. But in practice, over and over, you are forced to decide. Do you use an unusual word that delights you, or find a better known alternative? Do you want people to consider your ideas and admire your craftsmanship, or would you rather not distract them from the story? Should the book be easy to read, with a hook at the beginning, a twist in the middle, and a satisfying end? Or can it have longueurs, moments of strangeness, that release their pleasures slowly, if at all?
Every novel is made from choices like these, and if it were possible to list and study them, we would see whether most faced out or in. If you write mainly for yourself, it is a literary novel. It may please others, but that isn’t what you wrote it for. Novels written to please other people are non-literary. They naturally tend to repeat what has been popular before, and as a result they mingle into streams, which we call “thrillers”, “romances”, “space operas” and so on.
In practice, the distinction muddies easily. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy uses the pattern of detective fiction, but was made with literary choices, it seems to me. And let’s not kid ourselves. It is more prestigious to be an artist than an artisan, and some novelists write with that in mind. Their books resemble literary novels, but aren’t, because of course they too are trying to please an audience. As a result, their novels often form new streams. Right now, quasi-memoirs, some of them excellent, are enjoying much commercial and critical success. But if you write one because you know this, it isn’t literary. You are not writing for yourself.
At first glance, challenging avant-garde novels seem to guarantee their author’s literary intentions, because nobody would write one to be popular. On the other hand, for the same reason, this is the genre you would expect to attract people who yearn for literary prestige. Not caring what readers think and trying to look that way are – obviously – quite hard to tell apart.
Which is why it’s best not to worry about the word literary. Yes, it is a badge that means something, but we can’t pin it anywhere. Not even on ourselves.
BBC One’s Death in Paradise is one of the top three most popular programmes on British Television, enjoyed on screen as well as in a series of novels: we asked its creator, Robert Thorogood – how does writing the novels compare to writing the screenplays?
Although the genre, style and tone of the books and TV shows are broadly the same, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the process of writing for both of them is wildly different.
The first and most obvious difference is that the TV series really is a gang show: from original idea through to finished script, each writer on the TV show is helped by the input of the other writers, a script editor, story producer and other execs on the show. It means the writers are constantly supported, and the entirely natural crippling fear, doubt and panic any writer feels trying to get a story to ‘land’ is shared among the whole group.
Whereas when you write a novel, you’re on your own. And not just for a few days or weeks. For months. This can be hugely liberating (up to a point), as you can make and implement decisions in the story as quickly as you can think of them, but I have to confess that I really miss that feeling of ‘we’re all in this together’ that a TV show gives you.
Having said that, it’s surprising how much more freedom there is when you’re writing a novel rather than a TV show.
This is mainly because novels don’t have any budget restrictions, problems with hiring locations, actors’ availability, or sudden tropical downpours (or hurricanes) to contend with. In a TV show you’re always limited by what you can actually shoot, whereas with a novel you only have to write a sentence and you can conjure anything into existence.
For example, both of the stories for books one and two in the Death in Paradise series were ideas I’d first pitched as TV episodes, but we’d not been able to make them ‘work’. This was because the murder in A Meditation on Murder required a Japanese style paper tea house we couldn’t afford to build; and The Killing of Polly Carter required a cliff from which to throw a supermodel – and there’s no such cliff anywhere on Guadeloupe (where we film the TV show).
What’s more, we tend to have only limited locations in the TV show, because it’s already so very expensive to make each episode, whereas in a novel it’s possible for the police to go anywhere on the island for free. (This was something it actually took me quite a while to realize, and I’ve tried to make this a feature of Book 4 – Murder in the Caribbean, published in December 2018 – where I’ve purposely come up with a story that takes us on a tour of the whole of the island of Saint Marie).
But perhaps the greatest joy of writing the novels rather than the TV show is that a novelist gets to access his or her characters’ internal thoughts. Rather than rely on an actor as brilliant as Ben Miller to show the audience what my hero might be thinking, it really is liberating finally being able to access his misanthropic internal monologue and actually commit it to paper.
In summary, it’s hard to say which format I prefer writing, and perhaps the only conclusion I can come to is that while TV and books are both so very different, I’m extremely grateful that I get to do both.
Elodie Harper shares her impressions of a certain place in Norfolk that inspired her novels…
The first time I got a sense of the true menace of the Norfolk landscape was after I moved to the county to work for ITV News Anglia. I was assigned a reporting job in Great Yarmouth and set off in the car with David Bush, the company’s longstanding cameraman.
We reached the Acle Straight – or ‘new road’ as David called it, in typical Norfolk fashion given it’s almost 200 years old – and entered the marshes. It was early morning and the ground mist rose like smoke. On either side of us, the land rolled out, seemingly forever, and through the fog stood the blue outlines of what looked like windmills. The odd cow or sheep loomed up close to the road, separated from the cars by nothing more than a ditch. I felt like we had driven into the middle of a 16th century painting by an old Dutch Master.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“This is Halvergate.”
“Bit eerie isn’t it?”
“People get mesmerized staring out at the marshes,” he said, looking straight ahead. “End up in the ditch. Drowned, mostly.”
I didn’t know David too well at this point, so it was a relief after we got to Yarmouth, finished filming, and he became less gloomy over a helping of chips, but Halvergate never became less strange. I later learned it had originally been called ‘Hellfire Gate’, which seemed appropriate for a landscape that’s literally smoking from the flames beneath. It was where I built my fictional prison, HMP Halvergate in The Binding Song, but the marshes are also the place that I picture in my mind’s eye whenever I am writing and want to draw on the peculiar menace of the landscape. For me it’s the soul of Norfolk Noir.
Noirwich festival co-director Henry Sutton also writes under the name Harry Brett; here he reveals how Norfolk pervades his work.
There’s the Norfolk Noir of Henry Sutton and the Norfolk Noir of Harry Brett: both begin and end in Great Yarmouth, but Sutton’s stretches further, while Brett’s goes darker. From the beginning Sutton explored domestic dysfunction, driven as much by character, as place. North Norfolk – the eerie marshes, the fast-flowing tides, the vast skies, the unstable land – provided not just the backdrop but the tone and the hints of menace that my early novels, particularly Bank Holiday Monday, were packed with.
Then came the novel Kid’s Stuff, which had the landscapes and big, doom-laden skies – along with what I’ll call a Norwich Noir setting and theme. The novel’s centred on a white, working-class bloke, living in a place very like Norwich. He’s struggling to modernise, and the people closest to him suffer most from his frustration. The most chilling scene I think I’ve ever written takes place in this novel, on the Acle Straight, as he drives to Great Yarmouth.
Yarmouth features in all but name in My Criminal World. As does Norwich – again in all but name. The novel revolves around a crime writer dealing with block and outdated, bourgeois notions of genre. The work he’s trying to finish is a crime novel set in Kingsmouth – my amalgamation of King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth, though really it’s much more Yarmouth than Lynn, even down to the use of real street names. The point was to explore Norfolk’s most diverse and challenged communities.
This work and focus has continued with my Harry Brett novels, which are firmly rooted in Great Yarmouth, and combine, I like to think, the extraordinary physical vistas – both natural and manmade – with a tension derived from a town on the edge in every sense. While I’ve long believed that character and plot are intrinsic, I’d also like to add place to the mix, in equal measure. The Sutton and Brett novels are defined by character, plot and place. None could have happened elsewhere.
Nicci French is the hugely successful writing partnership created by married couple Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Here they discuss what it’s been like to live and write with the characters in their thrilling Frieda Klein series.
One of the surprises of writing fiction is that when you finish your book, when it’s published and sent out into the world, it’s still not really finished. As people start to read the book, the characters develop and slip out of your control. We had become used to that. Sometimes it’s disconcerting. Readers may not love a character as much as you do. Even more strangely, you create a villain, a violent criminal, and you meet readers who wish you had let him end up with the heroine. But he was a murderer, we protested, uselessly.
It didn’t matter. He was out of our hands now and he belonged to readers as much as he did to us.
Even so, we weren’t prepared for the entirely different experience when we began writing about the psychoanalyst, Frieda Klein, in Blue Monday and then followed her dark course over eight books and almost a decade of our life and of hers. Previously we had finished a book and sent the characters out into the world and we were done with them. Now we sent them out into the world, we talked to readers, we heard what they thought of them. And then they came back out of the world and we followed them in the next book and the next, as they changed and life changed them.
To take one example, in Blue Monday a Ukrainian builder called Josef Morozov literally falls through Frieda’s ceiling into her consulting room while she is conducting a session. Josef was invented to perform a specific role in this one book.
But he just wouldn’t go away. He refused. And readers were asking after him. They wanted to meet him again and we wanted to meet him again.
We came to discover that creating characters in a series of novels is like inviting people to a party. You invited friends, some family members, a couple of people from work, a few neighbours. Some of the people know each other, most of them don’t, but you never know who will get on with who. One of your best friends leaves early while two people you barely know and don’t know each other, get on uproariously and keep the party going until midnight.
Creating the characters for the series was rather like that, except if someone is sulking in the corner at your party, you can’t kill them off. Some characters appeared, did the job they were meant to do and then left. Or if they didn’t leave, they were killed. Others wouldn’t leave. Karlsson was a detective involved in the kidnapping case at the heart of Blue Monday. We weren’t sure how much he would be involved in later novels. But readers kept asking whether he was going to get together with Frieda. We had to keep him. Characters in the background – Chloe, her niece; Sasha, a one-time patient; Reuben, her mentor – gradually moved to the foreground as our solitary heroine gradually accumulated a family around her.
And all that attention still affects us. We’ve finished Frieda’s story but people still ask us about the characters. Where are they now? Where is she? We don’t know what to say. They’ve gone. She has gone. Out there somewhere, but beyond our control.
Cathi Unsworth introduces the real-life people and events behind her latest novel, That Old Black Magic. As Cathi reveals, the truth can be strange indeed, and very inspiring…
When it comes to writing noir fiction, I have found that the most bizarre characters and plotlines are ones you just couldn’t invent. Which is why my books are based on real cases that have either remained unresolved or contentious to this day. In That Old Black Magic I combine one of each, intertwining stories of witchcraft from the darkest days of World War II, with a cast drawn from reality that even the most imaginative of scribes would be hard-pressed to invent. Mediums, Ghost Hunters, music hall managers, Suffragettes-turned-Fascists and the corporeal spooks of British Intelligence haunt these pages. Please allow me to introduce you to some of them.
I first wrote about HELEN DUNCAN, the Highland-born medium who was the last woman to be prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in March 1944, in my last novel Without The Moon. My interest piqued about this still-controversial case by Tony Robinson’s BBC documentary The Blitz Witch, in the course of research, I discovered two more fascinating characters. Her ally, HANNEN SWAFFER was Britain’s most popular and trusted journalist – despite being a self-professed Spiritualist and Socialist, neither of which would gain you much Fleet Street traction now. Her nemesis, HARRY PRICE was the founder of the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, who investigated the phenomena of mediumship as Spiritualism reached its peak of popularity between the Wars, was a member of the Magic Circle and President of The Ghost Club. While Swaffer, along with scores of distinguished witnesses, testified to Helen’s veracity at The Old Bailey, Price provided the prosecution with photographs of the medium projecting ectoplasm that looked suspiciously similar to cheesecloth.
Price, alongside the remarkable MI5 spymaster MAXWELL KNIGHT weave together my two central stories. Knight ran a circle of agents throughout WWII who infiltrated the many strange, mystic cults with allegiances to the Nazis. His most infamous recruit was the traitor propagandist William Joyce, aka LORD HAW HAW, and his most famous friend the novelist DENNIS WHEATLEY, who also worked in Wartime counter-intelligence. In my fiction, Knight assumes the enigmatic form of The Chief. The case that binds them harks back to the April of 1943, when four young boys illicitly foraging in the grounds of Hagley Hall in Worcestershire made a grisly discovery inside a tree. Itself resembling a thing of nightmare, ‘the Wych Elm’, as it was locally known, was acting as coffin for the body of a woman, apparently ritually murdered and hidden there two years previously. Though no one came forward to identify her, graffiti started appearing across the region, asking: WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM? Is she the woman that my fictional detective, Ross Spooner, has been seeking since, on hearing the confession of a German spy captured in the Fens, The Chief sent him to the Midlands to find the elusive Agent Belladonna?
It is certainly the most intriguing mystery I have ever had the fortune to pursue. The many links between spies, Spiritualists, stage magicians and witchcraft covens, coupled with a breathtaking real life backdrop, might at first seem a little far-fetched. But I can promise you that all the weirdest details and strangest characters in this book are those I haven’t made up. And that’s… magic.
On the hunt for exhilarating new crime fiction reads this autumn? Enter the Noirwich + The Crime Vault book bundle giveaway competition!
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We were honoured to welcome the award-winning Soviet-Ukrainian American and French novelist and artist Yelena Moskovich for the annual Noirwich lecture 2022. Read a transcript of their lecture here.
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UEA MA Crime Writing Graduate Helen Marsden reviews our 2022 event 'Murder Most Modern' with Scarlett Brade and Bella Mackie.
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UEA MA Crime Writing Graduate Helen Marsden reviews the Noirwich Lecture 2022, delivered by Yelena Moskovich.
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The Crime Vault
Waterstones
National Centre for Writing
