(working title)
There is a particular smell that comes off old books when you open them for the first time in decades. Not the smell of decay, though that is part of it. Something closer to the smell of a room that has been shut up too long: dust and paper and the faintest trace of whoever last touched the pages. If you have ever bought a box of books from a house clearance, you know the smell. You know, too, the feeling that comes with it: that you are handling the remnants of someone’s inner life, the things they chose to keep on a shelf for thirty or forty or fifty years.
*Before the Drowning* begins with that feeling.
Dicky Sudbury runs an antiquarian bookshop in a small harbour town on the north Cornish coast. He has been there for twenty-six years. He came down from south London after a divorce, opened a shop he called Sudbury’s because he didn’t agonise over the name, and built a life among old paper and strong tea and a cat called Admiral who sits in the window and likes almost everyone. It is a good life. He knows it. He is not a man who carries bitterness or regret, and that groundedness is precisely what makes him the right person to find what he finds.
What he finds is a note.
It is tucked between pages 146 and 147 of a history of HMS Hood, the battlecruiser that sank in the Denmark Strait in 1941 with the loss of all but three of her crew. The book comes from the library of a man named Cador Trevelyan, whose collection arrives at Dicky’s shop in cardboard boxes after a family estate sale. Cador was a serious collector: maritime history, naval warfare, the kind of man whose annotations in the margins tell you more about him than a biography would. He died in 1966.
The note, written in Cador’s hand, describes a girl going into the water at a remote cove on a summer night in 1967.
A year after the man who wrote it was already dead.
That is the impossible problem at the heart of this novel, and it is the problem that pulls Dicky out of his comfortable life and into something he is not equipped for and cannot leave alone. Because Dicky is a bookseller, not a detective. He reads things for a living. He notices what most people would overlook: a foxing pattern on a dust jacket, a date that doesn’t quite fit, the particular weight of paper from a particular decade. He has spent his adult life handling objects that carry the residue of other people’s lives. He knows, instinctively, when something is wrong with a book. And something is very wrong with this one.
I wanted to write a mystery that turned on reading itself. Not code-breaking or forensic science or the clever reconstruction of alibis, but the simple, devastating act of reading a sentence and understanding it to mean one thing when it means another. We do this constantly. We misread people, situations, the past, each other. We read a line of text and our eye supplies what our expectation demands. We see what we believe we are looking at.
The note in Dicky’s till drawer is a single paragraph. Every word in it is legible. There is no cipher, no hidden ink, no torn corner. It is, on its face, completely clear. And Dicky misreads it. So does the reader. The misreading is not a trick; it is the natural consequence of the way the sentence is constructed, and the truth, when it arrives, has been visible on the page from the very first time the note appears.
That felt important to me: that the answer should be fair. That a reader going back to Chapter 4 after finishing the novel should be able to see it sitting there in plain sight and feel not cheated but astonished. The best mysteries, I think, do not withhold information. They rely on the fact that information, honestly presented, can be looked at and not seen.
The novel is set in Cornwall because Cornwall is a place where the past is physically present in a way that most of England is not. The granite is old. The harbours are old. The family names on the war memorial are the same names on the fishing boats and the shop fronts and the headstones in the churchyard. People belong to places there in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it. Dicky, for all his twenty-six years in Porthcarne, is still in some fundamental sense not from here. He is an outsider. And it is that outsider’s eye that lets him see what the community has quietly chosen not to see.
Porthcarne is fictional, but it sits precisely on a real stretch of coast between Hayle and Portreath: the rugged, relatively unvisited part of north Cornwall where the Atlantic comes in hard and the villages are small and the lanes between them are barely wide enough for one car. I placed it there because I needed a town old enough and tight-knit enough that a family secret could survive for fifty-seven years, and remote enough that a girl could go into the water on a summer night and not come out, and the silence afterwards could hold.
There are no detectives in this book. No police procedural, no forensic team, no interview room. There is a bookseller with a good eye, a sharp instinct, and a growing sense that someone he trusts has been lying to him for a very long time. There is a woman who has carried a secret since she was twenty years old. There is a man who loved someone and was told she was gone and has mourned her, quietly, for more than half a century. There is a dead man’s handwriting on aged paper, and the ghost of a mark that should not have been removed.
And there is a cat on the harbour wall, watching the water, as cats do, with no opinion whatsoever.
*Before the Drowning* is a novel about old books and old secrets and the distance between what a sentence says and what it means. I hope you’ll read it. I think Dicky would like that. He’d probably make you a cup of tea whilst you did.