As a writer, I am always inspired by a sense of place. Whether it be a gloomy city or a stunning hillside, a glass-strewn council estate or a majestic waterfall, something about my surroundings triggers ideas.
Let me take you back several years to a hillside in the North Pennines in an attempt to show you what I mean. I was on a family holiday and we were staying in a village on the Durham/Cumbrian border.
There was a play area in the middle of the village and every evening my two children would go for a swing and I would wander out to keep an eye on them - they had gone past the ‘Dad, give me a push’ stage but had not quite reached the stage where they could be left alone.
In such circumstances a person has a lot of time to think and, as they swung, so I found myself staring at the hillside opposite.
Something about the hill’s slopes and its late evening shadows, the way the buzzards hunted across the ridge, the sound of the sheep bleating and the distant barking of a farm dog, worked their magic on me and by the end of the week, an idea was born, eventually turning into The Dead Hill, my seventh crime novel published by Hale in 2008.
I returned to the area for the next book in the series, To Die Alone (Hale 2010) and once again used the real landscape, the hills and the ravines, towns and villages and for the third Harris outing as well. Currently, I am writing the fourth in the series, all inspired by surroundings.
I use a similar approach to my John Blizzard series for Hale, this time set in an urban city setting. Hafton is a bit of everything, the river and the terraced streets from Hull, housing estates from the North East, rural villages from East Yorkshire, the hospital in Darlington. Mix them all together and you have Hafton and that inspires me.
John Dean
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