A Murder in Tanner's Lane
A bolted door, a dead chemist, and a girl nobody believes.
The apothecary died alone in a room bolted from the inside.
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The Right of Way
Tar. Horse. Coal. Nothing else, and nothing grey at all.
That is what an old woman found on a dead man's hands in a Bermondsey yard in October 1888, and it is the only thing in this story that anybody can prove. The street has already decided he climbed a nine-foot wall in the dark with a hundredweight of coal on his shoulder. A boy of nineteen has his name in a complaint he had no part in. The woman who owns the yard sails for New York in three weeks, and the inspector who could stop it has been reading the file wrong for a week.
The Right of Way is a standalone Victorian mystery, about an hour's read, and the first meeting of Maud McLellan and Inspector Dunne. It is free. Tell me where to send it.
Suzanne Pallister
For twenty-two years I worked on the definitive map. It is not as grand as it sounds. It is the county's legal record of who may walk where, and my job was to settle the arguments, of which there were a great many. A gate goes up. A hedge moves nine inches. A family who have crossed the same yard since 1974 come home one evening and find they cannot.
I sat in a lot of village halls. What I learned there is the whole of my fiction: nobody in a boundary dispute is arguing about the boundary. They are arguing about being told. And a street will reach its verdict long before anyone official arrives, usually by breakfast, usually wrongly, and always unanimously.
So I write about streets. The first of them is one short street in Bermondsey in 1888 and 1889. There is a boarding house on the north side, a dispensary and a tannery wall on the south, and a yard behind the north row that four households have used for thirty years until somebody puts a gate across it.
I check things. Every date in the books falls on the weekday it really fell on. The distances are walked, mostly by me, usually in the wrong shoes. It is nine minutes from the lane to the police station, and I would like you to know I have done it twice to be sure.
I live in Guildford with my husband and a spaniel called Crale, who is named after a character I later killed off. He has never held it against me.
The hedge, incidentally, was on my side.
By Suzanne Pallister
A Murder in Tanner's Lane
Historical MysteryThe apothecary died alone in a room bolted from the inside.
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