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 The novel revolves around a crime writer dealing with block and outdated, bourgeois notions of genre.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.