When I first had the idea for my nuclear thriller, 59 Minutes, I knew that I would partly set it in the rugged wild beauty of Dartmoor. This is the kind of place where a person can find themselves extremely alone, and at risk, battling the elements while trying to find shelter.
If you’re unfamiliar with British moorland, I urge you to listen to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush to get into the right mood, and then dive into these atmospheric classics. The moors really are “wily” and “windy,” with vast open spaces, craggy rocks and plenty of thick heather in which you could easily hide a body….
There is more heather moorland in the U.K. and Ireland than anywhere else in the world, so perhaps it’s no surprise that British authors have long loved to set their books there, especially when those books are filed with eerie menace.
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Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
After apparently killing off Sherlock Holmes in 1893’s short story, “The Final Problem,” Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced to dust off his most famous character’s pipe and cap and bring him back for this serialised story in 1901.
It opens in London but Sherlock Holmes is soon off to Dartmoor to investigate the legend of a huge spectral hound that terrorises all the members of the Baskerville family to death.
The dense mist of Dartmoor, wild animals howling and isolated old mansions, all create a genuinely unsettling backdrop against which the Holmesian tropes sparkle—Watson drawing all the wrong conclusions, Sherlock’s ultra-rational response to what appears to be a supernatural antagonist, and of course, a surprising reveal.
Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn
Just over the county border into Cornwall, the eponymous (and real) Jamaica Inn is a smuggler’s den of a pub in the middle of Bodmin Moor. Daphne Du Maurier stayed there in 1930 and it now has a Smuggler’s Museum onsite. The bar is called “Smuggler’s bar.”
Published in 1936 but set around 1815, Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn is enveloped with a cloaking mist that allows all sorts of lawlessness to run unchecked. When orphaned young woman Mary Yellan arrives, she is immediately at odds with the dodgy and mistrustful locals. The landlord—her Uncle Joss—is a violent, drunken bully who stands at nearly seven foot tall, and terrorises Mary’s formerly light-hearted and cheerful Aunt Patience.
Things only get worse when Mary uncovers a smuggling ring with Uncle Josh at its heart. Soon she is in grave peril—at times taken out to the moor and abandoned, locked in her room, and physically attacked. Despite the epic landscape, it is a claustrophobic read, brimming with psychological details and well-observed characters.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is as weird, esoteric, experimental and challenging now as it was at publication in 1847. Structured like a conch shell, with stories with stories, shifting perspectives and unreliable narrators, Wuthering Heights is a book that keeps readers on their toes and demands attention. If this makes it sound like hard work, I’m doing it a disservice – it’s an absolute riot to read.
Originally published under an androgynous pseudonym, Ellis Bell, it was controversial from the get-go due to its subject matter which includes mental crises, brutal domestic violence, the subjugation of women, the dangers of childbirth, religion and the rigid Victorian class system. With the furore surrounding the recent trailer for Emerald Fennel’s reimagined movie adaptation, it’s clear this is still a story with the power to shock and surprise.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The Brontës are well represented here. All three of the Brontë sisters that made it to adulthood became writers, and all three set their stories in the Yorkshire of their upbringing. As a result, a swathe of land in the North of England is known (almost) officially as Brontë Country.
Jane Eyre bristles with social criticism, sharp observations and an introspective first person narrative that still feels fresh and bold. Orphaned Jane grapples with her identity and sense of belonging, finally escaping her abusive childhood through employment. She becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, a gloomy, isolated and gothic manor house large enough to have multiple apparently disused rooms and, of course, a deeply disturbed character secreted on one of the upper floors.
It was billed as a romance, and there is dark passion at its heart, but it is also a mystery, a character study, and a sly manifesto for social change and personal growth.
Agatha Christie, The Sittaford Mystery
Although she traveled widely and intrepidly in her life—rare film footage exists, shot by Christie, of her husband Max on site at archeological digs in modern day Syria and Iraq—it was her birthplace of Devon to which she always returned.
Legend has it that while suffering writer’s block as a young author in 1916, she took her mother’s suggestion to stay in the Moorland Hotel in the heart of Dartmoor. After writing all morning, she would then romp out onto the moors in the afternoon, muttering the dialogue she had written (the wind her only witness) and working through plot problems.
She stayed a short walk from Hound Tor, where my first suggestion—The Hound of the Baskervilles—is set. The fresh air did her good—she would apparently sleep for twelve hours each night and then wake up ready to work “laboriously all morning ’til my hand ached.” Soon, she finished her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
While The Mysterious Affair at Styles is set in Essex, Christie went on to set multiple novels and short stories in the rugged landscape of Dartmoor. The Sittaford Mystery (also published as The Murder at Hazelmoor) is my personal favorite. One snowy night in a Dartmoor village, a man is found dead after a séance at which that very man’s murder is predicted…
Agatha Christie loved Dartmoor so much that this was where she spent some of her final birthdays, picnicking with friends into her eighties.
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