Old coin and a new mystery
English history helps stir up Canadian novelist’s creative juices
Dead Ground In Between Maureen Jennings McClelland & Stewart
The Elizabethan coin was very old and very thin. Indeed, Canadian crime novelist Maureen Jennings was surprised at how light it was when she held it in her hand.
But the feel of that old coin, when she encountered it thousands of miles away in an English museum, was sufficient to stir up her creative juices.
“That was really exciting — to hold a coin that was actually that old,” she remembers, and she hopes she conveys that sense of wonder in her latest thriller, Dead Ground In Between, published this month by McClelland & Stewart.
There was more excitement when she visited the rural field where it had turned up. In 2011, a treasure hunter with a metal detector had discovered a small clay pot containing a leather pouch that in turn contained coinage from the reigns of Elizabeth l and Charles l. This discovery, now known as the Bitterley Hoard, constitutes the largest cache of coinage from the 17th-century English Civil War to be unearthed so far.
“Why it was never found before, nobody knows,” Jennings says. “It was just there. And the thing is — nobody knows why it was there. There are theories — but nobody knows.”
When a local archaeologist told Jennings the truth about these mysterious coins was forever buried in the past, her response was immediate.
“Hey — you’re talking to a mystery writer,” she told him. “This is like catnip to a cat!” The novel that was to become Dead Ground In Between was taking shape in her mind — with a cache of old coins playing a key role. But it wouldn’t feature her celebrated Toronto sleuth, Detective William Murdoch, whose turn-of-the-century exploits have earned her international acclaim and have also sparked the hugely popular Murdoch Mysteries television series.
This latest would again return Jennings to the war-torn England of her childhood and the world of Detective Inspector Tom Tyler, the troubled cop who made his first appearance five years ago in the novel Season of Darkness. It was something of a gamble back then for Jennings to abandon Murdoch for a new series set in England during the Second World War, but she was determined to go ahead.
“Murdoch was now doing his thing on TV,” she says matter-offactly. “And I had always wanted to write about what I experienced growing up ….”
Jennings is a big fan of the popular TV series Foyle’s War, which chronicled the wartime adventures of a South Coast policeman contending with the menace of German forces only a few miles away across the English Channel.
But the Tyler books introduce a different kind of home front. Jennings, who grew up in Warwickshire during the war years, has set Dead Ground In Between in nearby Shropshire, one of the most beautiful of English counties and also one of the least known to tourists. She has a particular fondness for Ludlow, a jewel of a historic town and Tom Tyler’s base of operation in the book, which is set in late 1942.
“Ludlow is my town — I love it,” says Jennings, adding she and her husband will visit it once again in September.
The actual Bitterly Hoard was discovered a few miles from Ludlow. Its fictional version is linked to the death of a troubled old man who goes missing in a winter storm and whose body is eventually discovered in a secret, governmentsanctioned hideout whose existence is known only to the highest levels of officialdom.
The long-suppressed story behind such hideouts fascinated Jennings during her research for the novel. They were related to the Churchill government’s establishment of a top-secret “auxiliary army” consisting of individual cellsized units that would be triggered into action in the event of an invasion.
“It was all in case the country was invaded, and they would need these places in which to hide out,” she says. “These men were commando-trained and their job would be to sabotage whatever they could, and they had to operate totally independently from each other.”
Revelations about the auxiliary army are but one thread in the tapestry of wartime Britain created for this book. Other elements include a nearby Italian prisoner-of-war camp, a pair of troubled Jewish children who find refuge in England via the Kindertransport system, the shortage of manpower on local farms, and the crimes — both minor and serious — that afflict a nation even in wartime.
And the person entrusted with keeping the peace in Ludlow is Tom Tyler, a world-weary policeman described in the London Daily Mail as “a complex and endearing character.”
Jennings says her inspiration for Tyler is Yorkshire-born actor Thomas Craig, who plays the crusty Inspector Brackenreid on TV’s Murdoch Mysteries.
“It’s not that Tom Tyler is like Brackenreid. But Tom Craig himself is kind of like Tom Tyler. I once saw Tom do a very tender scene, and I thought — oh yeah, I want to write a tough detective who’s also carrying this very wounded heart. And I wanted him trying to maintain law and order in a country at war.
“I didn’t want to him to be just a slightly different version of Murdoch, so that was a challenge. Tom Tyler is tougher and he’s tormented. And he’s not religious — that’s for sure. And it’s a different time period.”