“Where do you get your Miss Seeton ideas from?”
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.
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.
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