A Beautiful Place for a Murder
Five Leaves Publications, 2008. ISBN 9 781905 512454
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Short and well-written. I could locate myself brilliantly in this story.
Adele Geras
A Beautiful Place for a Murder is the best book I have ever read.
Andrew Smith (aged 13)
The sudden crack! of a farmer’s shotgun echoed off the rocks, sending a clatter of crows up. The drone of insects was as heavy as a roll of thunder. And in Miss Lingworth’s kitchen silence; utter, utter silence.
An open door, a silent, empty house, and day breathing towards night. Long grey shadows. Under the trees, pipistrelles darting like tiny black missiles. I couldn’t get home fast enough.
A Beautiful Place for a Murder is a murder mystery/love story set in Edale, an idyllic valley in the Derbyshire Peak District. It’s very different in theme from anything else I’ve written, and I got the idea for it when I dropped my purse one day and it was returned to me under quite unusual circumstances. I originally wrote it to be a short story for an anthology commissioned by Five Leaves, but it grew and grew and was soon too long for the original brief. The first three chapters were published as an extract called Strawberry Wine in the anthology ‘In the Frame’. By this time I was hooked on the story, and went on to complete it as a novel. I knew how it would finish long before I got to the end of it, and I think that’s the only way you can write this sort of book.
Writing tips
You could have a go at writing this sort of story yourselves (and who knows, it might develop into a novel). Fix yourself up with a set of interesting characters to start with. They can be real (with their permission, of course) or imaginary, or a mixture of the two, but they need to be very distinct from each other to make the story work.
In my novel the setting, Edale, and an old house in a railway cutting were very important in the story, and were both well known to me. Secondary school students in Derbyshire schools have written their own thrilling murder mystery stories after studying A Beautiful Place for a Murder, and they set them in places they knew well. This helps to create a strong sense of place in your story.
