DOUBLE IMAGES

WM has discovered a perplexing mystery involving mystery novels. As a 50-plus year resident of Dorset, your intrepid correspondent knew something was amiss when he saw the cover of Long Man’s Shadow by Anne Wilkinson. The cover art was a photo of Gold Hill, the most famous street in Dorset, but the strapline, right at the top of the cover, announced that the novel was set in ‘leafy Sussex’.

This was peculiar, given even people not fortunate enough to live in Dorset instantly recognise Gold Hill. Though that’s usually due to director Ridley Scott’s very famous Hovis commercial, which passed the street off as somewhere ‘oop north’. Nevertheless, the cover designer had just one job, to choose a cover image for a novel that boldly declares it’s set in Sussex that doesn’t immediately scream Dorset to all and sundry.

But then I came across another crime novel with a photo of Gold Hill on the cover, The Bookshop Murder by Merryn Allingham. This made me curious enough to check if – what are the odds? – it was also set in Sussex. And astonishingly, it was. The blurb begins: ‘Sussex, 1955…’

The coincidence doesn’t end there. Both books are cosy crime novels written by female authors which are part of series about female amateur investigators who work in shops. In Sussex. The heroine in one novel one owns a bookshop. The heroine of the other works in ‘a retro-vintage shop’. I’ll leave it to your deductive powers to work out which is which.

But really what are the chances that both these Sussex-set cosy crime novels would end up with a photo of Dorset’s most famous street on their cover? And why? What is going on? Writing Magazine wants to know. Perhaps someone will write a book about it. But what to put on the cover?