#TRAVEL TO ENGLAND'S CHANNEL COAST WITH GUEST AUTHOR KAREN McCULLOUGH

Hythe, Kent

Award-winning author Karen McCullough is the author of more than a dozen mystery, romantic suspense, and fantasy novels. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and numerous small press publications in the fantasy, science fiction, and romance genres. Learn more about her and her books at her website and blog.

A Visit to England’s Channel Coast

Having part of my family – my son, his wife, and two children – living across the ocean from me in England can be hard. I haven’t been able to be there to help when the children were born, nor can I manage to be there for all the developmental milestones, birthdays, special events, or when they need extra help due to illness or work crises. Still I’m grateful to live in this century when pictures and videos make it easier to keep up with them, and Facetime lets me even watch the children at play and talk face to face with them.

The flip side of the coin is that I have a great excuse for travel abroad.  It’s given us the opportunity to visit several places in that country and others in Europe. In 2015 we met them in Rome and did some travel around Italy.

Late last summer they had a second child, which limits their ability to travel for a bit, but we did have the good fortune to visit them in the town where my daughter-in-law grew up.

Hythe is a lovely town on the Channel coast in Kent, just southwest of Dover and Folkestone, on the northeastern edge of Romney Marsh. It has a beautiful shingle beach (stones, not sand) with a popular seafront promenade. On very clear days you can see the coast of France across the channel.

It’s an old town as well, with some buildings dating back to the Middle Ages, though most of the structures in the main part of town are a combination of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century vintage. But behind their antique facades, many of the buildings have been modernized and are still in use today. The main street is narrow but gets heavy traffic, except during the times when it’s blocked off to automobiles and the road becomes a pedestrian walkway.

Hither Hotel and Beach

It's not a very touristy place, which makes is a delight to visit, but it does have some features that make it well worth a visit, including a really magnificent hotel on the shore, the Hythe Grand Imperial. We had a chocolate tea there that was to die for!

The High street is lined with a variety of shops, teahouses, restaurants, and there’s even an antique mall. You can easily spend a day just browsing all the charity shops, the bookstore, the bakery, fruit and veg stalls, and have lunch or tea and cake at one of several lovely places.

A park with boats to rent and plenty of room for the kids to run around and play surrounds the old military canal that runs through the town. Or walk along the promenade from the hotel to the end where a tiny seafood restaurant serves some of the best fish and chips around, or better yet, have a scallop roll that will leave you dazed with delight.

Hythe is just two rail stops away from Dover, site of the famous ferry landing and of Dover Castle. The castle, which dates originally from the Middle Ages, is worth allotting an entire day. The main keep features displays of castle life in the fourteenth century, and the roof of the keep offers a panoramic view of the countryside, but the tunnels underneath were used extensively during World War II and the displays there range from fascinating to downright creepy. Also on the grounds are the ruins of an old Roman lighthouse and a chapel. We packed a picnic lunch, but there is a café on the grounds along with the inevitable gift shop.

Romney-Hythe-Dymchurch Light Rail 

A final attraction in Hythe is the Romney-Hythe-Dymchurch light rail line. Several times a day small coal-fired steam engines pull streams of passenger cars along a 14-mile light rail from Hythe to Dungeness. There’s very little in Dungeness other than a nuclear power plant, two lighthouses (an old one and a new electric one), a couple of gift shops, a few scattered old cottages painted matte black, and the shack Marconi built back around the turn of the last century to test out his radio. But it features an astonishingly strange and bleak landscape of shingle covering acres of coastline that is worth the journey all by itself. I could write another entire post on the rail line and Dungeness.

How does all of this tie into my books?  It doesn’t, really. But there is inspiration for any number of stories here and someday I’ll write one.

In the meantime, my latest release, Hunter’s Quest, is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Hunter’s Quest

Kristie Sandford's vacation is interrupted when a man jumps out in front of her car. She avoids hitting him, but when she stops to see if he's hurt, he demands she help him escape from the people chasing him. Kristie has an odd "gift" - she occasionally gets warning messages, and she gets one saying he needs her help or he'll die.

Jason Hunter is an NC SBI (North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation) agent working on his own time searching for a friend, an investigative reporter who disappeared while tracking down rumors of corruption in the bureaucracy of a small mountain town. Jason is grateful to Kristie for rescuing him, but dubious when she insists she has to continue helping him.

Kristie is attracted to Jason, but the edge of danger she senses in him reminds her too much of the abusive family she escaped as soon as she could. Still, the message said he'd die if she didn't help him, and the messages have been right before.

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#CORNWALL WALKING PATHS WITH GUEST AUTHOR CAROLA DUNN

Carola Dunn is the author of twenty-six mysteries and thirty-two Regencies. She was born and grew up in England but has lived in the US for many years. When not writing, she enjoys gardening, reading, and walking the dog. She has two grandchildren and cannot believe one is a teenager. Where did the years go? Learn more about Carola and her books at her website. 

The Joy of Walking

One of the features of England that I miss most here in the US, at least in the West, is the public foot paths. They crisscross the countryside, paying no heed to boundaries, climbing over walls and fences with the aid of stiles, crossing farmers' fields as freely as woods, hills, and dales.

Many of the paths are of ancient origin, medieval at least. Legally they are rights of way and can't be closed by landowners. The Ramblers organization zealously guards the public's access.

Cornwall, like the rest of the country, has footpaths everywhere. The main character of my Cornish mysteries, Eleanor, loves walking with her Westie Teazle on the cliffs and moors. She enjoys it the more because she spent most of her adventurous life traveling the world, working for an international charity.

On retiring to Cornwall, Eleanor looks forward to tranquility. She settles in a small fishing port on the North Coast and opens a charity shop, a peaceful occupation. But human nature is the same the world over. When crime comes to Port Mabyn, Eleanor finds the skills learned in far off places are not forgotten and become useful once again.

In the fourth book in the series, Buried in the Country, Eleanor’s talent for diplomacy is called upon by a friend from the past, a government official. He is holding a secret conference at a hotel on the cliffs near Tintagel, and he wants Eleanor to smooth relations between the antagonistic participants.

Megan's niece, Detective Sergeant Megan Pencarrow, is helping with security for the conference, although she's already on another case, the disappearance of a local solicitor. When two strangers turn up at the hotel, she can see they're villains. What she can't guess is whether they're a threat to the conference, connected somehow with the lawyer's disappearance, or contemplating some other nefarious business.

Now Eleanor's enjoyment of walking becomes vital to the story. Her description of the view of King Arthur's legendary castle ruins from the cliff top paths inspires enthusiasm in the young people. Their insistence on going for a walk, whatever the risk of being seen, leads to the revelation of what the two London villains are up to.

Caught in the act, the villains flee with hostages. The ensuing car chase takes them to fog-bound Bodmin Moor at dusk. Eleanor's familiarity with the rural byways helps Megan to follow and to rendezvous with her colleagues. They end up on Bodmin Moor, where the murderers disappear into the fog.

Night is falling. It seems they'll escape. But Eleanor often walks here. She knows the lay of the land and all the hazards: bogs, old mine shafts, precipitous quarry walls. She describes it for the searchers, and when she's denied a part in the search, she goes off hunting on her own.

Using every scrap of her local knowledge, combined with her talent at diplomacy and a few tricks she's learned in foreign parts, Eleanor emerges from the fog triumphant: She has captured one of the villains and he's spilled the beans.

Walking the footpaths of England, you are not at all likely to meet a murderer, of course. Nor will you meet a bear, a cougar, a skunk, a porcupine, or a rattlesnake; you won't even encounter poison oak or poison ivy!

Buried in the Country

After many years working around the world for an international charity in the late 1960s, Eleanor Trewynn has retired to the relative quiet of a small town in Cornwall. But her quiet life is short-lived when, due to her experience, the Commonwealth Relations Office reaches out to her to assist in a secret conference that is to take place in a small hotel outside the historical village of Tintagel.

Meanwhile, her niece, Detective Sargent Megan Pencarrow, is investigating the disappearance of a local solicitor when she is assigned to help provide security for the conference. Two African students, refugees from Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, arrive for the conference, escorted by Megan’s bête noire from Scotland Yard. They are followed by two mysterious and sinister Londoners, whose allegiances and connections to the conference and the missing solicitor are unclear. With a raging storm having trapped everyone in the hotel, the stage is set for murder, and it’s up to Eleanor and Megan to uncover the truth before more lives are lost.

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#TRAVEL TO #WALES WITH AUTHOR JUDY HOGAN

Worm's Head on the Gower Peninsula, Wales  (photo by John Ewing)

Author Judy Hogan takes us on a visit to Wales today, setting for her Penny Weaver Mysteries. Learn more about Judy and her books at her website.

The Gower! Gwyr in Welsh. How happy I always was to see the sign in English and Welsh as the bus took the road to the little peninsula near Swansea. My first visit had been in 1981 for one weekend. Then I’d been back for several weeks at a time in 1985, ‘88, ‘90, ‘95 and ‘96.

I loved the diversity of the landscape: chalk cliffs, the sea rolling in to wash against them, with tide pools and, on the cliffs themselves, wild flowers including orchids. I could walk in woods, explore ancient caves back to the Ice Age, see remnants of all the invasions into the land of the Britons, from the Romans, the Vikings, the Norman conquest of the French, and the present day tourists, though most of the “visitors,” as the British call them, came from the UK back in those days.

Today you’d find more Americans as well as more bed and breakfast accommodations, self-catering cottages, and the standby caravan parks and hotels. The landscape remains in some way pristine, and it’s an ideal place to explore if you have no car and like to walk as I did. There are footpaths everywhere and a bus runs along the peninsula.

Mrs. Merrett provided a single room and also gave me an evening meal for a little more per day. She and I became friends, and it was in 1990, when I suffered a minor injury and couldn’t follow my usual pattern of ranging the cliffs and seeking a spot out of the wind to write a poem, that she said, “Judy, you should write a murder.”

Edith Merrett knew I spent my evenings tucked up reading mysteries from the local library. I did begin plotting The Sands of Gower that visit, though I didn’t write it until the following summer. Poetry had been my creative writing focus until then. I tried that mystery for fun, but I enjoyed it for a different reason. Poetry has always helped me express my deep feelings, sometimes ones I scarcely knew I had. Writing fiction made it possible to articulate knowledge I had acquired through relationships, which was only partly conscious, about myself and other people.

I’ve always liked reading about the relationships of the characters, and I enjoy, more than plotting, getting at what people are like when they come into conflict with one another. I’ve had a lot of experience on the black/white line and find few books that explore that. So that became a major theme as my series advanced.

In The Sands of Gower Penny’s black friend Cathy is writing to her. In the second novel we meet Cathy in person, and also the lead detective in the village of Riverdell, Derek Hargrave. By the third book many more black characters appear, and I also began to take up community issues I’d learned about as I worked here in my own village of Moncure for safer nuclear storage, against air pollution, and in local politics. I’ve written sixteen books now and plan to publish them all over the next five years.

Most of the books take place in Riverdell, a central North Carolina village, but two more return to Gower. Penny’s husband is a Welsh detective inspector, whom she meets in The Sands of Gower, and once married, they normally spend part of each year on Gower.

The Sands of Gower

Penny begins a new and lively stage of life, her children raised, with a powerful erotic attraction, and the freedom to cross lines that usually hold people apart. The book is set in a bed & breakfast on the Gower peninsula near Swansea, Wales.

Penny Weaver, luxuriating in her two-month vacation, is disturbed by the murder of a German guest. Penny’s independent, outspoken American lifestyle contrasts with the more conservative ways of the village’s pensioners. In the process of solving the crime, Penny and Detective Inspector Kenneth Morgan are powerfully attracted. This, plus the British post-World War II continuing distrust of the Germans, complicates their investigation.

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#TRAVEL WITH SERENA--TOUR YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND WITH GUEST AUTHOR HELENA FAIRFAX

The Yorkshire Moors in Summer

Award-winning author Helena Fairfax was born in Uganda and came to England as a child. Since then she’s worked abroad in France, Germany, and Austria, and traveled to many countries, from Ecuador to Norway. Nowadays, she lives in an old Victorian mill town in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Today Helena joins us to talk a bit about Yorkshire, England and her latest novel. Learn more about Helena and her books at her blog. 

For many years I’ve lived in Yorkshire, in the north of England. If you live in England, you’ll know that Yorkshire people (or Yorkshire “folk”, as we say in our local dialect) are often subject to teasing from the people who live in the south. The British enjoy “taking the mickey” (teasing in a harmless way) and southerners’ jokes about Yorkshire include our northern accent (we say grass with a short “a”, as in “cat”; in the south, they say “grahss”, as in “harm”), and stereotypes such as our liking for clogs and flat caps, our love of meat pies, and how we live in poverty in a sort of Dickensian grime.

York Minister
photo courtesy of Pixabay.jpg

The jokes might be good-natured, but for many years Yorkshire has been treated as a poor relation to the more affluent south. London, Cornwall and Stratford-on-Avon in the south were always the biggest draw for tourists, and any travelers who ventured north would bypass Yorkshire altogether and head for Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands.

Recently, though, our status in Yorkshire as poor relations has changed. In 2013, The Lonely Planet named Yorkshire as one of its top tentravel destinations in the world. For those of us who live in Yorkshire, the accolade from The Lonely Planet came as no surprise. We call Yorkshire “God’s Own County” (we’re not modest, here in the north!) and we already appreciate the variety and staggering beauty of our large county.

Here are just a few of the attractions on offer in Yorkshire:

A visit to York, a former Roman city with Roman walls still surrounding it, and a medieval Cathedral, cobbled streets and fabulous shopping.

A visit to Whitby, a seaside town, chock-full of history, with an abbey, whaling, Captain Cook, and scenes from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

A visit to Bradford, the so-called “Curry Capital of Europe” and home to a renowned film festival.

A Street in Saltaire

A visit to Saltaire, my own hometown, a former Victorian mill town and a UNESCO-preserved World Heritage Site.

A visit to Conisbrough Castle, built just after the Norman Conquest in 1066, and featured in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

A visit to Harewood House, stately home of the present Earl and Countess of Harewood with a magnificent interior open to the public, and the setting for Brideshead Revisited.

The Yorkshire Moors in Winter

The area of Yorkshire I love the most, though, is the Yorkshire moors. Many years ago I spent a week in a hostel in the middle of the moors with a group of teenagers from an industrial city in Germany. They were on an exchange with a group of English young men from a similar urban environment. I remember sitting in the coach with them on the way from Leeds/Bradford airport, watching them gaze out at the rolling heather, the moors stretching into the distance, all greens and purples, with not a bar, or a café, or a McDonald’s in sight.

One of the Germans murmured, with his face pressed to the window: ‘Ich habe Grün-Schock.’ Literally: I’m suffering from green shock. What a great expression!

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about that week on the moors, and last year I began to turn the experience into a story. The moorland setting is wonderfully wild and romantic. Kate, the heroine of my novel, takes a group of disadvantaged London teenagers on a trip to the Yorkshire moors, in the company of an upper-class journalist. In the middle of the countryside, surrounded by sheep and moorland, how will they all get on?

Heather on the Yorkshire Moors

Although I’ve lived in Yorkshire for many years, I’ve traveled an awful lot in my life. One thing I’ve learned from my travels is that people are the same the world over. One of the teenagers in my novel is from Afghanistan, and I took the theme of my story from an old Afghan proverb: ‘There is a way from heart to heart.’ My story is filled with differences in culture: between town and country, between north and south, between rich and poor. Despite the outward differences, the theme of the novel is that people are the same across the globe, whether from Yorkshire, London or Nigeria, and have the same human emotions and the same capacity for love. ‘There is a way from heart to heart’ is the positive, uplifting message I wanted to leave readers with at the end of my novel, and it’s also the main lesson I’ve come to learn from my own many travels.

A Way from Heart to Heart

After the death of her husband in Afghanistan, Kate Hemingway’s world collapses around her. Her free time is spent with a charity for teenage girls, helping them mend their broken lives—which is ironic, since her own life is fractured beyond repair.

Reserved, public school journalist Paul Farrell is everything Kate and her teenage charges aren’t.  But when Paul agrees to help Kate with her charity, he makes a stunning revelation that changes everything, and leaves Kate torn.

Can she risk her son’s happiness as well as her own?

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