Three days ago, I received a copy of Holmhill Farm and found a handwritten message from the author:
For Jamie,
this is the only printed first proof of Holmhill Farm.
I hope you like your ancestral character!
Julie Missen
That was intriguing.
It also meant I had to crack on and read the bloody thing. You cannot be handed the only printed first proof of a novel, be promised an ancestral character and then leave it underneath a pile of unread biographies for six months.
Well, you probably can. I have developed a fairly sophisticated system for doing exactly that. But this one jumped the queue.
Felixstowe!
I get a completely unreasonable amount of excitement whenever Felixstowe appears in a book.
It does not matter how briefly. Somebody can walk along the seafront, catch a train at Felixstowe station or merely complain about the wind and I immediately sit up with the enthusiasm of a man whose hometown has finally been admitted into literature.
Holmhill Farm does not merely mention Felixstowe. It is rooted here.
The story begins on 31 January 1953, the night the East Coast Flood devastated the town. Forty-one people lost their lives in Felixstowe, with some of the deepest water recorded in the West End. It remains one of the darkest nights in the town’s history and is remembered by the town’s Flood Memorial.
Against that real tragedy, Julie Missen builds a modern mystery involving Detective Inspector Morgan, an unexplained death connected to the night of the flood and a secret that somebody at Felixstowe Town Hall would apparently prefer to remain hidden.
This is the fourth book in her Detective Inspector Morgan series, and Felixstowe is not just somewhere to park the story. The marshes, the flood, the Town Hall and the history of the place are all tangled up in the mystery.
Not Cornwall Road again
There was also a strange coincidence.
Last week I finished Come Up Screaming by Steffan Piper, another novel set in Felixstowe. That book included Cornwall Road, a road with very personal connections for me because my nana lived there and I knew the actual house used in the story.
Then Cornwall Road appeared in Holmhill Farm too.
Two consecutive books. Two Felixstowe stories. Two appearances by Cornwall Road.
I am beginning to suspect Cornwall Road has acquired a literary agent.
There is something wonderfully peculiar about encountering familiar roads and buildings inside a novel. For most readers, Felixstowe Town Hall or Cornwall Road is simply part of the setting. For me, each familiar name briefly pulls me out of the story before drawing me further into it.
I know where that is. I have walked there. I can picture it. I may even know somebody who has complained about the parking.
That recognition gives a local novel an extra dimension. You are not just imagining the setting supplied by the author. You are filling it with your own geography, memories and entirely unnecessary opinions about the quickest route across town.
The real Holmhill Farm
Holmhill Farm itself is not something invented simply because it sounds suitably sinister.
Also known locally as Rats Hall Farm, the abandoned farmhouse stands on the Felixstowe Marshes. It was left derelict after the 1953 flood and has since become one of those local landmarks surrounded by history, speculation and atmosphere.
Even photographs of the place make it look as though it has been patiently waiting for somebody to put it into a murder mystery.
Julie has now obliged.
The isolated farm, the marshland and the memory of the flood provide a genuinely unsettling background. The real history is not attached to the story as decoration. It drives the mystery and allows the past to keep intruding upon the present, generally when the present would much rather it stopped.
My completely fictional ancestor
Then we come to Stan Versey.
To be absolutely clear, Stan is not a genuine ancestor whom Julie uncovered after years of painstaking research into the Versey family tree.
She made him up.
Julie did not discover an ancestral character for me. She invented one, gave him my surname and inserted him into the murkier corners of Felixstowe history.
Most authors might put your name in the acknowledgements. Julie created an entire fictional branch of my family and immediately made it suspicious.
I will not explain exactly how Stan fits into the mystery because that would spoil one of the book’s important discoveries. Suffice to say that when the name Stan Versey appeared on the page, reviewing the book objectively became rather difficult.
I had been promised an ancestral character and there he was.
Not real. Not related. But unmistakably a Versey.
And, in traditional Versey fashion, already causing complications.
Past and present
What works particularly well is the way the novel connects its present-day investigation with events from 1953. The flood is not treated as a convenient historical date on which to hang a fictional crime. Its effect on Felixstowe, its families and the physical landscape remains part of everything that follows.
The mystery develops through old relationships, incomplete memories and secrets that have survived far longer than anybody intended. Morgan and Cook gradually piece together what happened, although every answer seems to expose another question.
The writing is direct and accessible, allowing the investigation to move without becoming buried beneath pages of police procedure. The Suffolk setting gives the story its own identity too. This mystery could not simply be lifted and placed in another anonymous coastal town. Felixstowe and its history matter.
That mattered to me too.
A particularly personal proof
It was always going to be difficult for me to review Holmhill Farm as an entirely detached reader.
This is a mystery written by a Felixstowe author, set in Felixstowe, built around one of the defining events in the town’s history and featuring a completely fictional character called Stan Versey.
I also read the only printed first proof, personally inscribed by Julie.
No pressure, then.
Fortunately, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The combination of local history and modern crime gives the novel real atmosphere, while the familiar locations made the experience unusually personal. Readers who know Felixstowe will recognise the landscape and understand how effectively its marshes, coastline and history lend themselves to a mystery.
Readers from elsewhere will find a well-paced Suffolk crime story constructed around a genuine historical tragedy.
They just will not have to pause halfway through because the author has invented them a relative.
Two books, one road and a fictional Versey
After Come Up Screaming and now Holmhill Farm, I have read two Felixstowe novels in consecutive weeks. Both mentioned Cornwall Road. One included a house I knew and people I still know. The other presented me with a fictional ancestor and then made him part of a murder mystery.
I cannot deny that Felixstowe fiction has been very good to me lately.
Although I am slightly frightened to see what the next local author has planned.
If a Jamie Versey appears in somebody’s book running a quiz, playing Fleetwood Mac records and quietly upsetting a local committee, I shall know things have gone too far.
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