I've been blogging for a few weeks now about crime, murder mysteries and working with David Bridger and I'm going to keep that coming because there's plenty to think about around the project. This week we made a commitment to a trilogy, and that these will be The Wessex Mysteries.
Wessex is a wonderfully evocative name, I think. It conjures up two wildly different things. The first is Thomas Hardy, who had a fictional version of the south west that featured in his novels. I'm not a huge Hardy fan (I've read three now) but I am really interested in the idea of how stories relate to landscapes, and his Wessex has been highly influential for a lot of people.
Go back a bit further and Wessex is an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and has strong associations with King Alfred. Alfred the Great is one of those historical figures who stands on the edges of history and myth - he's the one with the burnt cake story.
The Wessex area also has a lot of prehistory in it, and I'm looking forward to giving that more thought and attention as we go along. The presence of history in the landscape is definitely going to be a theme for these books.
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