‘Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall?” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1921. For centuries, the natural beauty of Cornwall has captured the imagination of writers and the resulting literature is as varied as the landscape itself, from sunny novels that revel in the picturesque to authentic and unflinching depictions of one of the poorest regions in northern Europe.
My own approach to writing about Cornwall is one of both escapism and realism. The Shell House Detectives grew out of a longing for the wide-open skies and seas of Penwith during that endless winter of 2020/21. An image kept returning to me of a weatherboard house in the dunes; an unlikely friendship forged in a moment of crisis. As much as I play into the conventions of the cosy crime genre, I’ve also drawn my own line in the sand, conjuring a world that I hope is enchanting but also feels real.
