There’s been a murder on the Royal Crescent – but fortunately, it’s all fiction. Melissa Blease meets bestselling Bath author Harriet Evans, aka Harriet F. Townson, to discover the inspiration behind her latest 1930s mystery, the irresistible Dora Wildwood and a city with plenty of stories to tell. Image credit: Photography by Philippa Gedge
Eek, there’s been a murder on the Royal Crescent! But before you search for breaking news bulletins, put the kettle on, plump up those cushions and prepare to settle in for a gripping read-all-about-it, totally clickbait free and in your own time.
The murder we’re investigating “happened” decades ago – 1936, to be precise – and every single why, wherefore and whodunnit is documented and eventually solved by librarian and part-time detective Dora Wildwood, who readers initially encountered in Harriet F. Townson’s first Dora Wildwood book D is for Death (published in 2024).
Legions of Dora fans have been waiting for her second murder-mystery to be unveiled since they read the final paragraph of the first one – and just last month, Murder on the Royal Crescent brought that wait to an end.
On publication, the story of how Dora gets involved with an unsolved murder followed by a second murder on the twentieth anniversary of the original crime set against a backdrop of Christmas trees, carol singers and one of the most iconic historic locations in the UK instantly met with a shower of auspicious critical acclaim: “A love letter to Bath, to lady novelists, to classic crime”; “Like stumbling across a lost Dorothy L. Sayers novel by way of Mitford and Wodehouse” (authors Joanna Nadin and Laura Wood respectively.) “I’ve never read murder-mystery before, but Dora’s turned the page on that!” (erm – me.)
Bath isn’t just a Bridgerton theme park for rich people!
Dora is instantly likeable. She’s multi-faceted but down to earth and, despite the time-frame and the complex yarn she’s drawn into, relatable and authentic enough to draw you right into that world with her. But of course, she’s fictional – and so too, in a way, is Harriet F. Townson.
“D is for Death started off as a sideline project really,” says Harriet Evans, the bestselling Bath-based author who has 15 award-winning novels in her back catalogue to date, including the multi-generational epic family drama The Sevenstones Trilogy. “I adore Dorothy L. Sayers, I adore Agatha Christie – and I thought, can I do this? My editor at the time suggested that I try. Like a lot of women, I was full of self-doubt about it, but when someone else suggests that you can do something it’s enabling. But I wanted to keep Dora a little bit separate from my previous novels, which were published under my own name. Harriet F. Townson is a combination of Francis, my grandmother’s maiden name, and my dad’s mum’s maiden name, Townson – I wanted to honour them both!”
Harriet pays further fascinating tribute to her family’s back story in Murder on the Royal Crescent too; her grandfather was one of the Fortt family, the prominent Bath confectionery company best known for producing the famous Bath Oliver biscuit, and also a key player in legendary Bath establishments including the luxury restaurant and tea room Cater, Stoffell & Fortt Ltd. on Milsom Street (now a branch of Waterstones bookshop) and a much-loved traditional grocery on St. Margaret’s Buildings.
My imagination is huge but I enjoy keeping one part of my brain really quite chaotic, wild and unkempt, and the other part really quite organised and structured.
“There’s a Milsom Street scene in Murder on the Royal Crescent because I wanted to include a little shout-out to my family; that sense of place is really important to me,” Harriet reveals. “Also, I really wanted to reflect what it was like to be a normal person living in Bath in the 1930s. It’s funny that there aren’t many books set in the city apart from the obvious ones; as much as I love Jane Austen – and I really, really do – Bath isn’t just a Bridgerton theme park for rich people!”
Indeed – and neither is the all-access foray into the grand house on the Royal Crescent that Dora offers us anything close to an invitation into one of the grand Bridgerton-style family homes. But taking a step back from the book’s incredibly evocative cosmos, the level of detail in Murder on the Royal Crescent, from time/place factual to the small domestic elements that make a story complete, is impeccable.
“A big part of my job is to do so much research that the reader relaxes and focuses on the story completely from the very first page without being aware of the preparation behind it,” says Harriet. “I have to learn way more than I’m ever going to need to know, and ChatGPT is never going to be enough! I’m a member of the London Library, where D is for Death is set. I once spent a day in the library’s Times Room, which holds every copy of The Times from around 1787. I read every single issue of the paper from every day of the four weeks in which the book is set from cover to cover, taking photos of what plays were on at the theatre and what was being broadcast on the radio – if you know what people were listening to back then, what clothes they wore, what houses were sold for in those days, you can enter that world. It was the same for Murder on the Royal Crescent, getting the detail of all the stuff that’s happening in the background right – Crystal Palace has just burned to the ground, Nazi Germany consolidated its dictatorship, there’s the abdication going on, Baldwin will have to resign and Chamberlain will take over – it’s quite a dark period. And in addition I had to get the city that my family has lived in for hundreds of years right too!”
As for creating those characters…?
“Oh, they have to be totally invented!” Harriet laughs, “but they have to be real in my mind. I have a little questionnaire that I ask myself about them: what would their favourite film be, what happened to them as a child to make them who they are today, what were their parents like? The real skill of a writer is letting that chink of background light in, sometimes almost by sleight of hand, to explain who those characters really are. My imagination is huge but I enjoy keeping one part of my brain really quite chaotic, wild and unkempt, and the other part really quite organised and structured; if you’re going to bring home a huge tanker of a crime novel, you have to be really organised – but a large part of that process has to be untrammelled too.”
When Harriet isn’t flitting between a working day packed with that unique combination of trammelled dedication to research and untrammelled creativity that eventually leads to the publication of another long-awaited novel, she’s a busy mum with two daughters aged 10 and 15 to occupy her time. Could Dora be seen as a role model for young women – or indeed, is Harriet herself a role model for women writers in general?
“Well there aren’t that many young fictional female detectives out there, put it that way!” says Harriet. “I don’t like didactic novels, but personally I was always looking to see myself in books and not finding myself in the pages. Dora is completely and entirely authentic to herself, and also really clever; young people might read Dora and think, oh yeah, she’s herself, and she just gets on with it! But in general, I would love us to live in a world where women like me, who write books about women’s lives, aren’t hugely patronised and overlooked; we have to make our own case to be taken seriously because by and large, we’re really, really not! We get diminished, our books are called chick lit, and male writers are still taken far more seriously. When I feel that rage rise within me, I walk along to Persephone Books on Edgar Buildings and see both men and women buying books by women who should have been celebrated more in their own lifetimes, knowing that they’re going to get a really great novel.”
And what Harriet F. Townson, and/or Harriet Evans, and/or Dora Wildwood, have given us, in Murder on the Royal Crescent, is exactly that: a really, really great novel, well worth celebrating.
Murder on the Royal Crescent is published by Viking and available now. RRP £16.99
And for those keen to discover more about the woman behind Dora Wildwood, there’s an opportunity to meet Harriet in person when she visits Topping & Company Booksellers on York Street on Monday 16 November at 7pm.
The evening celebrates the publication of Murder on the Royal Crescent, offering readers the chance to step beyond the pages and into the world of its creator. Fortunately, the only mystery on the night should be how Harriet dreams up such deliciously devious plots.
For tickets and further details, visit toppingbooks.co.uk.