Hamilton Crane's Blog: My Miss Seeton Stories

My 25th mystery – “Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton” – was published in the year I had my 70th birthday. Having noticed that even the Author's Notes from some modern best-selling authors use four-letter-words, I felt like a throwback to gentler time and wondered about retirement.

Then I learned that Catherine Aird was still writing mysteries in her 90s (she has just published a new Sloane and Crosby mystery at the age of 93, and has the next one planned) so I felt that age was no excuse for retiring. But what should I write? Back in 2020 we were entering the world of Covid, closely followed by the events in Ukraine. To kill more people, even in light-hearted fiction, felt like self-indulgence.

Instead, I decided to abandon Plummergen and write about a different fictional village – one where no-one was ever murdered. I could not do that as Hamilton Crane, because purchasers would expect a Miss Seeton mystery. I couldn't even do it under my real name (Sarah J. Mason), because all eight of my books had also been mysteries. That meant I needed to choose a new name, so I headed off to my family tree in search of one.

My pseudonym for the new series comes from my grandfather’s grandmother: Roseanna Hall. She married John George, and I would have loved to use the name of their daughter (my great-grandmother) but, as you’re all mystery fans, you’ll understand that I couldn’t claim I was Elizabeth George!

The first book by Roseanna Hall is “Moving to Combe Tollbridge”. It is published today by Farrago and the series title is An Exmoor Harbour Tale because, although it is set in the present day, its location is very much in Lorna Doone country. I have already submitted the second tale (working title "Adrift in Combe Tollbridge"), and am assembling my ideas for the third.

When my publisher first read this one, he suggested there was scope to introduce more drama and tension, but I argued that people already have plenty of sources of drama and tension, and might welcome something more relaxing.

I hope you will enjoy my Roseanna Hall stories, and I apologise to those of you who would have loved another Hamilton Crane, but we all need to know when to stop.

At present Goodreads still won't accept that my Roseanna Hall account belongs to the author of Roseanna Hall's book, so the only place you can read more about me as Roseanna Hall is https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/.... Fortunately, Amazon does accept that I'm three different authors!

PS - For connoisseurs of book jacket art, Amazon's page for the paperback of Moving to Combe Tollbridge (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moving-Combe...) currently shows an early draft which included a helicopter. The page for the Kindle edition shows the helicopter-free cover art which actually appears on the paperback. Any of you who buy the paperback will discover that the back cover image is a subtly-modified version of the front cover image.

The Goodreads computer doesn't currently believe that I (under my new pseudonym) wrote the book being published on 3rd August (under my new pseudonym). I've tried four times, and no-one seems to know what the problem is. Consequently it looks as if I'll be celebrating Publication Day with a post on this blog.

Any of you registered as NetGalley reviewers have just a few days remaining to obtain a review copy of the book - see https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/287534.

It may be four years since I last posted, but I have not been idle. I have been writing a new non-mystery series – for which, of course, I have had to choose a different pseudonym.

The first book is due to be published in August, so I have just applied to register my pseudonym with Goodreads. Once that has been verified, I will post again to tell you more about it - and will, of course, then let you know my new pseudonym.

Happy reading!

Yes, Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton is now available, and those of you who pre-ordered the eBook should already have received yours. I've delayed my announcement until today because I'm one of those who still feels a book has only really been published when there's a copy of it in my hand. And my author's copies arrived this morning - yes, even on a Sunday!

I'm most grateful to those of you who have reviewed the book on NetGalley and Goodreads. I’ve never had so many pre-publication five-star reviews before. I do hope everyone else will find it equally enjoyable.

There is one final mystery that you may care to ponder. Too late, I've noticed a stray word in Chapter 14 that should have been removed before publication, but somehow it slipped through the proof-reading net. Of course, Farrago will correct it on future releases, but those of you with the original version have something of a collector's item. No prizes for puzzling out the answer, but when you spot that extra word and wonder about it, you'll know what happened.

Best wishes to you all from

Hamilton Crane

A Happy New Year to all Miss Seeton's readers, followers, and friends!

Miss Seeton's 25th adventure, Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton, will be published in February 2019.

If you have never read a Miss Seeton, you may have arrived here because you enjoy Miss Marple, and want to know whether Miss Emily Seeton is a similar character to the better-known Jane. Well, the answer is a qualified Yes ... with a rather more emphatic No!

It's now 50 years since the first Miss Seeton mystery appeared and, after reading Picture Miss Seeton, Ogden Nash, that master of humorous light verse, declared the little spinster to be “the most delightfully satisfactory character since Miss Marple”.

Some readers have been confused by this remark. They expect Miss Seeton to be just like Miss Marple but, while Ogden Nash enjoyed both characters, he knew that they were distinct.

There are of course similarities.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton, both unmarried ladies of a certain class and breeding, are both past retirement age.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton are both village-dwellers, each in her own cottage with its garden.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton both have contacts in the police force ...
And that’s about it!

The many differences between them are what make Miss Seeton so very special.
— Miss Marple is an elderly lady of limited but independent means. Miss Seeton has only recently retired, but needs to augment her teacher’s pension; fortunately she's often employed as a Special Art Consultant to Scotland Yard.
— Miss Marple has a maid; Miss Seeton has a “daily woman” twice a week.
— Miss Marple knits; Miss Seeton does yoga.
— Miss Marple lives in St Mary Mead, but only three of the twelve novels about her are set there; Miss Seeton lives in Plummergen, and the majority of her 25 adventures are based there.
— Miss Marple is so unobtrusive that she can come and go pretty much unnoticed. Miss Seeton is noticed and talked about almost everywhere she goes (not least the Plummergen Post Office) and, under her soubriquet of The Battling Brolly, has been frequently mentioned in the press.
— Miss Marple is universally popular in her world, but even in Miss Seeton’s own village there's a vocal group of conspiracy theorists convinced that no truly innocent person can possibly be the subject of so many encounters with the police.
— Few of Miss Marple's neighbours appear in more than one novel; many of Miss Seeton's neighbours appear in several novels, and some in nearly all of them.
— Miss Marple solves crimes by drawing parallels with the trivia of village life. Miss Seeton draws too, but she draws pictures. These pictures are swift, intuitive sketches she refers to as "scribbles" and they help the police to solve crimes, but Miss Seeton herself doesn't actively solve anything.
— Miss Marple lives a calm, quiet, retiring existence. Miss Seeton believes that she lives a calm and quiet existence, and always thinks that some mistake must surely have been made whenever she is the object of (say) a kidnapping, or an attempted murder.
— Miss Marple may carry an umbrella when the weather demands it, but Miss Seeton carries an umbrella regardless of the weather. And in her hands the umbrella, like the pencils she uses for her lightning sketches, can produce surprising results.
— Perhaps the fundamental difference between these two English gentlewomen is that Miss Marple believes in the existence of Evil, and sees it at work in murder cases. Miss Seeton, despite numerous corpses, multiple crimes, and several attacks upon her own person, has never been entirely convinced, and prefers to think the best of everyone if she possibly can.

Back in 1986 Neysa Chouteau wrote a perceptive analysis of Heron Carvic's original five Miss Seeton adventures. It was called The Singular Miss Seeton, and it mentions an article by Heron Carvic himself in Dilys Winn's Murder Ink. Miss Seeton's creator felt that Miss Marple’s crime-solving success must be based on a strong element of intuition, and concluded that he must endow Miss Seeton with an even stronger form of psychic ability if she in her turn was to be of assistance to the police.

This psychic ability allows Miss Seeton to produce the intuitive drawings that so much disconcert her, as she feels that as an artist she should draw only what she sees. She doesn't realise that, as she draws, she is seeing beyond apparent reality to the ultimate truth. Fortunately the police — in particular “that nice Mr Delphick” — are invariably able to interpret her scribbles and arrive at that truth, thereby solving the case about which they have consulted her.

Whatever slanders her detractors may utter, Miss Seeton can’t believe anyone is talking about her. Why should they? After all, she leads such a quiet life. It is easy to see why she thinks this. Whenever villains threaten, their plans will somehow go awry. Nothing worse than the occasional drenching in a pond or canal ever befalls her, and even then she will insist that any such drenching was the result of her own carelessness — and certainly isn't the result of any deliberate action against her on the part of anyone else.

Perhaps what makes Miss Seeton most special is our confidence that her adventures will never keep us awake at night. She reassures us. She convinces us that life need not be as awful as the news media wish us to believe.

Long may she continue to do so!

If you had planned to give copies of Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton as Christmas presents — or to settle yourself in a comfortable chair with a box of chocolates and the new title as a holiday treat — I must apologise, because plans have been changed.

Although both major British wholesalers listed the publication date as 13th December 2018, there were unexpected alterations to the publishing schedule. Indeed, the page proofs arrived for me to correct only last week! I've now finished work and returned them, and currently expect Miss Seeton's 25th adventure to be released towards the end of February 2019.

Again, my apologies — and my very best wishes to you all for Christmas and the New Year.

You may perhaps recall this snippet in Miss Seeton Quilts the Village:

"To be blunt—" began Delphick, and broke off as he saw Oblon's eyes widen, then narrow ...

Oblon’s reaction baffles Sergeant Ranger, who even makes a shorthand note about it. However, modern readers who know some history might not share the sergeant's bafflement.

The novel is set in 1975, and this particular scene (at the Foreign Office) involves some discussion of possible security leaks from Britain to countries behind the Iron Curtain. Unknown to Delphick and his sergeant, in real life as far back as 1964 a man holding the (genuine) position of Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures had confessed to MI5 that he was the “Fourth Man” in the Cambridge spy ring that included Burgess, Maclean, and Philby. The confession was kept secret until 1979, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher disclosed to the world that the traitor’s name was … Anthony Blunt.

When Delphick so casually uses the word “blunt” Oblon’s shocked response is to stare in horror at the thought of a mere policeman (who in the same context has just spoken of "pictures") being made privy to this closely-guarded secret. Which, of course, was not the case.

If you spotted that my use of the word "blunt" so close to "pictures" was deliberate, then please accept my congratulations. And if you didn’t, then I hope you feel that this obscure reference didn’t interfere with your enjoyment of the rest of the book.

You may also have noticed that Bonjour Miss Seeton, first published in 1997, concludes just a week before Nigel Colveden’s wedding to the charming Louise. The pair evidently had the longest honeymoon in history! We pick up the story again in Miss Seeton Quilts the Village which, although first published in 2017, opens just before the happy couple's return from the Isle of Wight.

Some explanation is required for that twenty-year delay before Miss Seeton comes back from her trip to the north. We soon learn that “the unexpected arrival of so rare a visitor as the yellow-crowned night heron had of necessity somewhat prolonged her stay.” What could have been more appropriate for Miss Seeton than a rare (for Britain) heron? Mr Carvic, her creator, would surely have approved.

If you've been waiting for the last of my Miss Seeton quizzes, it is now available at https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/112.... This one covers the five books from Bonjour Miss Seeton onwards.

And, as for waiting, I have to advise that publication day for Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton has been put back to February 2019. If I'm to continue my fortnightly blog until then I'll need to find some new topics. If there's anything you'd like to see covered, please suggest it.

PS - Returning to my theme of external references from inside the story, there can be few better examples than Edmund Crispin's Holy Disorders. Crispin was still approaching his peak with this book, which does contain the odd disturbing scene, but much of it is truly comic crime. Not only has the character named Henry Fielding never heard of Tom Jones, but much of Chapter 8 is taken up with Gervase Fen's visit to Canon Garbin's study, where he encounters Garbin's pet raven. The subsequent behaviour of Fen and his companion Geoffrey Vintner may mystify readers who, like Garbin, are unfamiliar with the poem ... but this scene surely deserves an Edgar!

After one or two short stories, Miss Seeton first appeared in a full-length novel in 1968 - fifty years ago! Heron Carvic wrote his books “in the present” and their settings moved forward from 1968 to 1975. It was only to be expected that things would change in the lives of the series characters.

The main developments for Heron Carvic were Bob Ranger's marriage, and promotion for both Superintendent Delphick and Chief Inspector Brinton (Odds On Miss Seeton shows how confusing this can be for an author).

Sir Humphrey Everleigh points out in Miss Seeton Draws the Line that our heroine is “a catalyst”, with the result that while others might change “Miss Seeton may, almost certainly will, remain the same”, as indeed she has. This hasn’t, however, prevented me from developing and creating other characters in the series.

For example:
— Ashford's busy police station needed more than a handful of CID and a few uniformed coppers! My intention was for Sergeant Mutford just to take charge of the front desk, but over time he has come to think he runs the whole station.
— Heron Carvic’s interest in the village gossips had centred on the Nuts, but he allowed Mrs Flax to speak in one book; he mentioned both Mrs Scillicough and Mrs Spice, and Hampton Charles added Mrs Skinner and Mrs Henderson. As well as introducing Mrs Newport, and giving Emmy Putts a mother (Clarrie) who works in Brettenden's biscuit factory, I've offered all the gossips more definite roles, and created a rivalry between Mrs Skinner and Mrs Henderson over the church flower rota.
— Heron Carvic made us all familiar with the George and Dragon as Plummergen's pre-eminent hostelry, but he never mentioned the name of the landlord. I decided that he was Charley Mountfitchet, and that he couldn't run a pub with only Doris (Heron Carvic) and the unreliable Maureen (Hampton Charles) to help him. If Charley was a bachelor, who did the cooking? He now has a wife, Bertha, who is busy behind the scenes but makes no personal appearances.

Now consider the following characters: Flora Bannet, Mrs Benn, Mr Baxter, Colonel Windup, Mr Welsted, and Delilah Dawkin. Many of these names are mentioned in several books. It’s true that some of them are dead, but the thing they all have in common is that they are spoken of, but seldom (if ever) speak themselves. Admittedly, Mrs Benn had a few exchanges with others in the Harper & Row edition of Picture Miss Seeton but she hasn’t spoken since the Popular Library paperback of that title back in 1977.

That’s series characters for you!

With just over a month to go before publication of Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton, I’ve released the fourth Miss Seeton quiz for you to test your memory at https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/112....

When you join Goodreads as an author, the first automatic question you receive is “Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?”, so this week I'm writing about the origins of some things you've read in Hamilton Crane's previous contributions to the Miss Seeton series.

My main source is the daily newspaper. There are strange enough events reported in real life for them to fit easily into Miss Seeton’s world, sometimes needing a gentle adjustment and sometimes none at all.

Plummergen’s “Night Watch”, for instance, was inspired by genuine reports such as “a dozen members of the Good Neighbour scheme surrounded the house brandishing broomhandles and dustbin lids” preventing the intruders from escaping before the police arrived. In another town members of the “Neighbourhood Watch patrol the streets in pairs armed with mobile phones and powerful torches” while the police “welcome the volunteers as a useful deterrent”. A rather less formal arrangement, which I haven’t (yet) used was when “angry villagers chased a drunken motorist who hit another car, dragged him and his passenger out of their vehicle and tied them up before calling the police". The drunken driver was duly arrested and prosecuted, but his captors “have not been traced”!

You've often read of Plummergen's involvement in the Best Kept Village competition, and when I visited the "real" location back in 1990 I found a litter bin bearing a plaque to mark that village’s win in in 1967. Plummergen's (invariably successful) rivalry with Murreystone has parallels with the case of a village that was “banned from the county’s best-kept village competition after winning the title three years in a row”.

Other scenes I didn’t need to invent because they appeared in newspaper reports include the use of tomato ketchup splashes on clothing to persuade people to be helped out of their “blood-stained” jackets (soon returned with apparently less ketchup and definitely no wallet), and the use of homing pigeons as couriers for cocaine.

Similarly, it used to be possible to find pearls in the occasional fresh-water mussel, just as Miss Seeton learned when she was in Scotland. The “Abernethy Pearl” is probably the most famous, made still more famous by a court case to resolve ownership. NB - don't try this during your own Scottish holiday, as it’s now illegal in Britain to disturb these mussels.

One final cutting I’ve found in my collection dates from 1990 and relates to a variety of technical predictions. Here are three of them: “Today, most television screens have the ratio 4:3, but once you’ve watched a 5:3 screen you never want to go back” which sounds pretty much like the 16:9 ratio that's now so popular. “Gas meters would be replaced by an electronic device which could be read from outside the house” sounds exactly like the so-called smart meters causing such controversy in Britain at present. The one I’m still waiting for is the suggestion that “Microwave ovens would be replaced by even faster ovens using radio waves”!

Books 11 to 15 in the Miss Seeton series feature in the third Miss Seeton quiz, now available for you to test your memory at https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/112....

And in case you're wondering - we've just completed copy-editing of Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton so it's still on schedule for publication in December.

The 25th Miss Seeton adventure (Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton) is now just eight weeks away, and my editor is finalising her work on it, but in this blog post I’m considering books 6 to 10 - when the HC pseudonyms began.

Heron Carvic does sound like a pseudonym, and it was certainly his stage name as an actor, but his marriage certificate calls him “Heron Carvic formerly known as Geoffrey Harris”. Both names originate within his family: Georgiana Carvick was Geoffrey Harris’s great-grandmother, while her husband (Sir Richard Mayne, Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police in the 1850s) had a sister who married Mr Basil Heron.

Heron Carvic died in 1980, and Miss Seeton’s first reappearance after his death came in 1988, when the books were issued in a different order. Picture Miss Seeton was released third, which must have puzzled readers new to the series. By the time the fifth and last title, Odds On Miss Seeton, appeared in 1989 the series had proved popular all over again. I don’t know exactly who said what to whom, but the first Miss Seeton sequel appeared in April 1990, written by the secretive Hampton Charles. (You’ll notice that, unlike Hampton Charles, I have always had the copyright for my titles registered in my real name.)

In those days it took nearly a year to go from manuscript submission to published book, so by the time Miss Seeton, By Appointment appeared on the bookshelves I had already been approached to succeed Hampton Charles. James Melville (author of the Superintendent Otani series) told me that he’d heard I was to write some Miss Seeton books - and then admitted that he’d been behind the three Hampton Charles titles. I learned that James Melville was also a pseudonym, for (Roy) Peter Martin, and that Hampton Charles was the name of a tiny hamlet in his part of England.

The new publishers (Berkley) were obviously keen for us to use pseudonyms that retained the HC initials. I chose Hamilton as this had been my hall of residence at the university of St Andrews, but I couldn’t at once find a relevant surname beginning with C. However, herons and cranes come in the same section of most bird books, and the problem was quickly solved.

The most pressing problem was time. Berkley had been able to issue the Heron Carvic titles at three-month intervals, but to maintain this schedule both James and I had to write fast while still adapting to someone else’s characters and style of writing. There were inevitably some mistakes. It was a great relief to discover the odd inconsistency in Heron Carvic’s own books!

While I was researching his work I realised that Heron Carvic must have based Plummergen on a real place. He mentions distances to real places, so it wasn't too hard to deduce which village was in the right location; it was close enough to where I then lived for me to go exploring and take some (very amateur) photographs.

The Francis Frith Collection of professional photos includes some views of the village in the 1950s, when it must have looked much as Heron Carvic saw it, and here's a tiny example (you can, of course, buy larger ones):

Although the pub is not called the George and Dragon it is, like Plummergen's George, close to the church; the road past it really is The Street. But there are also differences. Miss Seeton’s cottage should be just out of the picture on the right, but unfortunately that's something else Heron Carvic had to invent. A house with its own considerable history stands in that location, with a clear view northward up The Street; but The Street does indeed narrow to a lane running south beside the garden wall and across the Royal Military Canal.

I hope you now feel inspired to attempt the second of the five new Miss Seeton quizzes. You can find it at https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/112.... This quiz deals with the three Hampton Charles titles, and the first two of mine.

Good luck!