Murder on the Downs by Julie Wassmer
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‘A controversial new property development is planned in Whitstable, to the dismay of Whitstable residents who view it as a threat to local wildlife. A campaign is spearheaded by Martha Laker, a committed environmentalist and no stranger to controversy. The resulting tensions strain local restaurateur Pearl's close relationship with London-born police officer, DCI Mike McGuire. The protest goes ahead, and residents claim a moral victory. But the victory is short lived when Pearl discovers a dead body on the Downs.’
Murder on the Downs is a delicious summer pudding of a book, and every reader who dips into it will pull out a plum. This is only to be expected from an author with Julie Wassmer’s long and distinguished writing career, working on series like Eastenders and London’s Burning. I asked her to answer some of the questions her latest book brought to my mind, and I’m delighted to say that she agreed. Here is our interview, in full. Thank you, Julie!
Food is an important motif in Murder on the Downs. What effect does the availability of high quality local produce have on the economy of small towns like Whitstable?
Whitstable has been my adopted home for the past twenty years and this little fishing town on the north Kent coast is most famous for its local oysters – with an annual oyster festival taking place every summer on the weekend closest to 25th July. To establish the importance of the town as a central location in my crime series, the first novel, The Whitstable Pearl Mystery, focused on the death of a local oyster fisherman on the eve of the festival. The discovery of Vinnie Rowe’s body (the supplier of oysters for my heroine Pearl Nolan’s restaurant, The Whitstable Pearl), forms the “inciting incident” which sets Pearl on a mission to discover if his death was an accident, suicide – or murder.
Pearl personifies the town and its connection to oysters – she is a true Whitstable native – though it’s ironic that the famous “native Whitstable oyster” is unavailable during the town’s oyster festival. In fact, it’s the pacific rock oyster that’s enjoyed here during the summer months and, like many of the visitors to our town, the pacific rock oyster is actually an “outsider”. It was introduced to our waters and has taken up so much of our marine environment, the Environment Agency is now trying desperately to contain its spread. Locals would see a parallel with the influx of DFLs (Down From Londoners) who, smitten with the town, have bought second homes here thereby forcing up the price of available property for local people – an issue I explore in my new book, Murder on the Downs.
On a positive note, with an abundance of independent shops and restaurants selling everything from specialist English cheeses to local seafood, our broad range of local produce remains a permanent attraction, and a stimulant for the local economy, as well as allowing our independent shops to survive against the encroachment by chain stores. Our geography in Kent means that, as a writer, I have exceptionally rich and varied terrain for my locations - with countryside and orchards only a ten-minute drive away from the town centre – and the great city of Canterbury just eight miles down the road.
In my books, Pearl’s restaurant, The Whitstable Pearl, always showcases the variety of local produce on offer – not only seafood, but fruits of the field, and Pearl’s supportive relationship with suppliers in the town mirrors my own. One shop I have featured in the books, The Whitstable Produce Store, has been thriving for nearly ten years with owners, Steve and Amanda Jones, working hard with producers across Kent to supply the county’s superb food and drink. They tell me: “local fruit and vegetables are incomparable – strawberries and cherries are particularly luscious this year – but it doesn’t stop there. Local producers keep us supplied with everything from wonderful bread, cakes, honey and jams to wines, ales and locally roasted coffee. And the town’s “indie” vibe is very special. It’s great to be a part of that. It’s also a great privilege for me to be able to feature this important aspect of our town in my books – as I am a foodie and have campaigned, with many others, to Keep Whitstable Independent.
Motherhood determines the life choices of your protagonist, Pearl, and there are other strong mothers in the book. In your writing career, how have you been influenced by relationships between mature women and their adult children?
At the start of the series, Pearl Nolan is introduced as a woman on the brink of 40, wondering whether she can revive old dreams and take up the career she had abandoned when a teenage pregnancy got in the way of her becoming a police detective. For the past two decades she has remained anchored to her home town of Whitstable, bringing up her son, Charlie, while managing a successful seafood restaurant, but when Charlie heads off to university, “empty nest syndrome” and the discovery of a dead body lead Pearl to start up her own private detective agency. Pearl’s mother, Dolly, wishes her daughter could let old dreams die because Pearl’s cases put her in physical jeopardy - but they also place her with DCI Mike McGuire of Canterbury CID – and Dolly is no fan of the police…Pearl has a strong though tricky relationship with her mother - an eccentric, unconventional “artist” in her mid-sixties. It’s true that every character in a novel displays elements of the novelist in some way or another and while I recognise traits of myself in Dolly Nolan, Pearl is the kind of woman I would like to be; a strong and fearless survivor. In many ways Pearl appears to be more the responsible parent in this relationship while Dolly behaves like the rebellious daughter - but Dolly brings her own wisdom and experience not only to Pearl’s cases but to her daughter’s ‘will they/won’t they’ relationship with Mike McGuire. Dolly knows Pearl like no-one else.
I was a TV drama writer before writing these books and spent almost twenty years writing for the series, EastEnders. During my time there, I found myself working on many episodes centring on the show’s epic mother-and-daughter storylines: Pauline Fowler and Michelle; Carol and Bianca Jackson; Sonia Branning and Chloe but probably the most notable of these storylines concerned Kat Slater and her teenage daughter, Zoe - who had been brought up to believe she was Kat’s sister.
Mother and daughter relationships can often prove to be problematic and though the dynamic between Pearl and Dolly in the books adds another form of crime teamwork, I’m keen not to present them as a predictably cosy family, but rather a pairing of opposites - a sparky partnership underpinned by love and mutual dependence.
Family businesses play a significant part in the action. What reasons would you give for the popularity of this type of enterprise in many fiction genres?
As Tolstoy wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Certainly, family businesses can be fraught with the kind of challenges that make for riveting literature.
Within my books, Pearl’s own family business, The Whitstable Pearl restaurant, always serves as a useful central location – a hub – not only for Pearl’s family members but for the town itself. Pearl and her restaurant act as a fulcrum between the locals and visitors – the natives and DFLs – the traditional and the new.
In Murder on the Downs, I included another family business in the form of a local newspaper dynasty, and also featured the tensions within a broken family whose property interests are threatened by the ambitions of a development company.
A “family business” can present a fascinating arena for conflict in fiction. Charles Dickens, who had a home in Kent at Gad's Hill Place in Rochester and also kept a summer home at Bleak House in nearby Broadstairs, explored in his novel, Dombey and Son, the frustrations of a parent with no son to whom he could pass down a successful shipping business.
In my own books, the founder member of the “family business” is not the parent but the child – Pearl – a single mum who has had to rely on her own mother for support in the restaurant - though Dolly is a terrible cook so could never have helped on that score… Pearl’s son, Charlie, also helps out at The Whitstable Pearl but only intermittently, and to subsidise his own ambitions, but the business also serves as a support for members of Pearl’s surrogate family – like young waitress, Ruby, who has no family of her own.
In terms of crime novels featuring a “family business”, perhaps none has been so successful or popular as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, centring on the Corleone family and their internal mob war within the Mafia. The book stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for no fewer than sixty-seven weeks and sold over nine million copies in just two years – proving that in literature “crime” within the “family business” pays…
Outsiders often act as the catalyst for unwelcome change in fictional communities. In ‘Murder on the Downs’, the DFLs are the outsiders. Which outsiders in classic literature have inspired you?
A very interesting question – especially as I still vividly recall my first encounter, aged 12, with the monstrous figure of Grendl, descendant of Cain, in the saga of Beowolf. Grendl is the feared “outsider” who threatens the safety of the tribe not only because he literally slaughters and consumes its members but because by choosing to live outside the tribe he disturbs the social fabric that unites it.
I am intrigued by this kind of “outsider” in literature – and also how they are viewed. For example, the character of Meursault in the Albert Camus novel, L’Etranger, is a man reviled as a monster for his apparent lack of remorse for a murder - but also by failing to shed tears at his mother’s funeral, he appears to display an unacceptable and dangerous indifference to the norms of society.
The outsider as rebel is represented in the character of Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but, of course, Smith is unsuccessful and ultimately falls victim to the system and its rejection of truth to survive.
In popular crime fiction, Tom Ripley continues to fascinate me – the “outsider” who wants so much to belong, he becomes the object, and destruction, of his own desire – Dickie Greenleaf.
In Agatha Christie’s crime novels, Hercule Poirot appears as another kind of “outsider”, the “foreigner” who repeatedly falls victim to the kind of xenophobia that existed in England between the wars. Dismissed disparagingly by members of English society as an irritating little Frenchman, Poirot constantly defends himself: “Je suis Belge!” - though perhaps his ultimate defence is the solving of heinous crimes committed by those who would choose to look down on him.
In my new book, Murder on the Downs, the DFL property developers are indeed the external forces trying to push unwanted change on a local community but I was keen to properly present their own arguments as a counter balance to the opposition they face from a Whitstable protest not unlike one I took part in myself to save local wildlife from unnecessary tree clearance. As mentioned, the tension between the DFLs and local people is always present in my Whitstable Pearl Mystery novels but nevertheless there remains a symbiotic reliance between the two: the local economy depends on visitors but too many of them results in the kind of change that threatens the very nature of Whitstable’s traditional idiosyncratic charm. A delicate balance has to be achieved and the relationship between Pearl and the DFL police detective, DCI McGuire, embodies this dilemma with the travails of their on/off love affair forming a serial element to these stand-alone novels.
Ultimately, however, it is murder itself that proves to be the most dangerous “outsider” – the pebble tossed into the quiet waters of Whitstable’s ostensibly peaceful environment that ripples out to threaten its inhabitants - and its status quo…
Julie Wassmer
Watch the trailer for Murder on the Downs
