Latest cosy crime thriller from Chichester novelist
Chichester novelist Greg Mosse is in print with the second in his cosy crime series, Murder At Bunting Manor, following on from Murder at Church Lodge – part of an accelerated publishing schedule which will see the first four released within a year.
Numberonecameoutinjuly, andnumbertwoseesseriesheroine and amateur sleuth Maisie Coopertrappedinchichesterby the repercussions of the first – the point at which she is drawn into another mystery: “The first bookcameouttowidespreadacclaim which is what we wanted but the point is that you can't sell your book to everybody because not everybody wants a cosy crime novel. The idea is to reach the people that will enjoy itandithinkwedid.thethirdin theserieswillcomeoutinmarch and the fourth will come out in July. And I've got the fifth one written.”
Greg went into the publication of the first with the advantage that he had the first three written already: “The way it all emerged was that just before lockdown I was at a writing festivalwithmyagentwhosaid‘you would be very good at writing cosy crime’, and that was the almost the last thought that went throughmyheadbeforethelockdown, before I drove around the country picking up our children and keeping them safe and before the whole of theatre, which iswhatidid,becameillegal.and soistartedwritingandiwasstill in touch with my agent and able tosendhim20,000wordchunks here and there just to say ‘Is this what you wanted?’ It meant that Ihadaframeworkofencouragement from a professional right from the start.”
Andrightfromthestartgreg also had his setting – Chichester (which remains Chichester in the books) plus the villages around it (which acquire new names) – just as he remembers itallintheearly1970s:“thepoint is that these are cozy crime novels which means that at the end you should be smiling and you should feel that all is right with the world and that the one big scar, the one evil-doer has been removed and that everything is good again. And I think the lovely thing is that people identified with my heroine Maisie and the sort of person she is, strong and enterprisingandintelligent.the first mystery was when she was called back from her job in Paris in order to attend her brother's funeral, so you could feel the depth of the emotion plus the charm of that 1972 setting.
“As the younger sibling she followed her unreliable brother and went into the army. In 1972 she is in her early 30s and she has had the post-war experience when the whole world was a product of the global cataclysm, and with that she had a strong sense of service. She also followed her brother who was a keen horseman and fencer and she became a successful pentathlete in the days before women were allowed to compete so you sense that she is an enterprisingladywhobangsher head against the limitations of theera.andnowinthefollow-up book, she is trapped in Chichester. She is prevented from getting back to Paris because of the solutiontoherbrother'smurder.
She needs to be there in court. Andbecausesheisinchichester someoneshevaguelyknowssays ‘I understand you have solved a mystery. Can you solve one for me as well?’”