It was the Midsomer Murders books that finally persuaded me I could write contemporary fiction.
Not because I wanted to write murder mystery – though I do in fact write cozy mysteries under the name of Robyn Beecroft. No, it was because the villages and towns referenced in the Midsomer books did not exist.
I’d been worrying that if I wrote contemporary fiction, I would have to choose a setting and then count the pieces of chewing gum that had been mashed into the pavements there.
I would have to put pubs in there that everyone recognized and give them fictional owners. Imagine the backlash when the real landlords heard of this!
Imagine me being stopped in the street by irate locals to tell me I’d got the numbering of the houses on the High Street all wrong, or rubbish collection happening two days late.
So much research just to have no input on the details of my own fictional world? Ugh. No thanks.
But if the county of Midsomer had been slapped down into the UK will-he-nill-he and the fictional construct of the UK had absorbed it like it had always been there, then why couldn’t I insert my own entirely-made-up town?
Put like that I got quite excited about it.
Now I could have all my favourite things in one place.
I went into the Trowchester series with great glee. I’d always loved the riverside in Ely, where you can sit, eat an ice-cream and watch the narrowboats drift quietly up and down.
Why not a story where one main character built narrowboats and had a house by the river?
Who doesn’t adore an eccentric bookshop? What about a charming, literate bookshop owner with a shady past? All the better if the shady past comes back to threaten him with arson and kidnapping from which his love interest could rescue him.
And that was the seed of Trowchester Blues.
I was on a roll now!
I could have morris dancing. I could have historical re-enactment.
Historical re-enactment was the hobby that ate my life before I transferred 100% of my enthusiasm to dance. I spent at least twenty years spending most of my summers trying to be as authentically Anglo-Saxon or Viking as possible.
Here have a video of my reenactment society!
https://regia.org/gallery/videos.php
I’m not new to mining my hobbies for story ideas, mind you. The Reluctant Berserker was written with the advantage of a lifetime of Saxon and Viking experience behind it… but more on that in another post.
As far as the Trowchester series went, of course this meant that I had to write a book in which a morris man met a Viking while dancing at the fair.
That book was Blue Eyed Stranger, named after this dance
By the time I approached the third book, Blue Steel Chain, I had run out of hobbies, but I still had my life-long fascination with archaeology to fall back on.
I grew up near Alderley Edge, where there is a natural spring with a carving of a man’s face around it. It’s called the Wizard’s Well. Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?
Given that I was collecting all the cool things in the world for my series, the Wizard’s Well made its way into Blue Steel Chain, along with a Bronze Age burial mound.
And because man cannot live on dusty bones alone, the Bronze Age burial mound turned out to be the last resting place of a young murder victim who bears a suspicious resemblance to one of our heroes.
How did he get there? Will the same fate befall Aidan, and can nerdy archaeologist James save him from it before it is too late?
These and many other questions are answered in Blue Steel Chain.
If that sounds interesting, you’ll be happy to know you can get all three books together in a box set called Trowchester In Blue which works out as costing slightly less than buying two of the books individually.
That’s a quick round up of the series so far. Three contemporary mm romances, all with a blue theme in the title, cunningly wrapped together in a blue box. What now, though?
Obviously it was time to start another three in a different colour.
And that brings me to my new release, which came out on the 15th of May 2019.
Seeing Red
But that’s a subject for another post…
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