The Lake District is a national park in Cumbria, northwest England, known for its glacial lakes, rugged mountains, and literary history. It is the largest national park in England, established in 1951, and is a popular tourist destination featuring scenic walking routes, charming villages, and unique wildlife. A holiday destination, an escape from the industrial northern cities of England and landscape that inspired the Romantic Poets, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and later legendary children’s authors such as Beatrix Potter and Arthur Ransome of Swallows and Amazons fame.
So let’s start with a couple of popular series that get us into the villages and towns of the Lakes. The Lake District Mysteries are a series of detective novels by British crime writer Martin Edwards (an occasional contributor to CrimeReads). The series starts with The Coffin Trail (2004). Historian Daniel Kind moves back to Brackdale, the sleepy little Lakes village where he grew up — and his father’s old patch as a detective inspector. There he is drawn into a cold case from his youth working with his father’s protégée, DCI Hannah Scarlett of Cumbria’s Cold Case team.
The Lake District Mysteries give you the Lakes you’d expect from the postcards and travel documentaries – quaint stone cottages, ancient Norman churches, fields, woods and, of course, lakes. There are seven books in total in the series all featuring Hannah Scarlett and Cumbria’s cold-case team. Book three, The Arsenic Labyrinth (2022), takes place in the beautiful lakeside town of Coniston, others move to Ambleside, Keswick, Ravenbank and finally in book seven, The Dungeon House (2025), to the cliffs of Cumbria above the Irish Sea. It’s a hard series to beat for scenery!
Rebecca Tope also does a series of Lakeland mysteries featuring florist Persimmon ‘Simmy’ Brown who moves to the Lake District for the peace and quiet – little does she know!! There are seven books in the series starting with The Windemere Witness (2012) and each book is named after another Lake District beauty spot – Coniston, Troutbeck, Hawkshead, Bowness and Grasmere. Cosies, with some great Lakes scenery and characters.
Some standalones set in the Lake District:
- Abigail Dean’s Day One (2024) is a dark novel that begins in a Lakes village hall during a primary-school play when walking in and destroys the peace and calm of the close-knit Lakes community of Stonesmere. In the weeks following the cataclysm, conspiracy theorists start questioning what happened. Two young people find themselves at the epicenter of the uproar: Marty, the town’s golden girl and daughter of a teacher killed that day, and Trent, whose memories of his brief time trying to fit into Stonesmere fuel his attachment to the conspiracies. But what really happened?
- A Lethal Walk in Lakeland (2025) by Nicholas George finds former San Diego detective Rick “Chase” Chasen enjoying a walking tour of the Lake District. But murder is never far from Rick unfortunately. It’s bucolic countryside, an interesting party of fellow hikers with the exception of a family of loudmouth Texans, one of whom gets themselves poisoned. Chase then finds out none of his fellow holidaymakers are who he thought they were.
- Massively popular UK crime writer, and doyenne of Britain’s crime writing community, Val McDermid took a trip to the Lakes in The Grave Tattoo (2022). It’s summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Could it be linked to the old rumour that Fletcher Christian, mutinous First Mate on the Bounty, had secretly returned to England? Scholar Jane Gresham wants to find out. She believes that the Lakeland poet William Wordsworth, a friend of Christian’s, may have sheltered the fugitive and turned his tale into an epic poem – which has since disappeared.
And finally, let’s look back to a couple of classics of Lake District crime fiction from the British Golden Age of crime writing and part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series (edited and introduced by the aforementioned Martin Edwards – a force to be reckoned with in British crime writing circles!).
John Bude’s The Lake District Murder (1933) is pure English Golden Age crime writing. Set amidst the stunning scenery of a small village in the Lake District when a body is found at an isolated garage, Inspector Meredith is drawn into a complex investigation where every clue leads to another puzzle: was this a suicide, or something more sinister? By the way, John Bude was the pseudonym of Ernest Elmore who wrote 30 crime novels, was a co-founder of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association, and worked in the theatre as a producer and director. Most of his novels were set in interesting locations from the French resort of Le Touquet (ever popular with the English for golf and gambling), the Sussex Downs, Cornish coast and so on. However, he does also seems to have known the Lakes quite well – the local publication, the Cumbria magazine wrote of The Lake District Murder, “You do get the best of both world here – learning more about genuine Lakeland life of the times, plus it’s a rattlingly good detective yarn.”
ECR Lorac’s Still Waters (1949) sees trouble brewing Chief Inspector Macdonald in Lunesdale, deep in the Lancashire fell country. The treacherous slopes and still waters of a quarry pool have become the backdrop for strange happenings by night, and after an architect surveying the area is nearly hoisted into the cold waters by an unseen assailant, the suspicions of local farmers become a matter for the CID.
ECR Lorac was the pen name of the British writer Edith Caroline Rivet. Her character Chief Inspector Macdonald was a recurring character and first turned up in The Murder on the Burrows (1931) and over 30 other novels including Death on the Oxford Road (1933), Murder in St John’s Wood and Murder in Chelsea that were published up until the end of the 1950s. However Lorac/Rivet also wrote regularly about the country as well as the town and also favoured murder-mysteries set in ski resorts too. Lorac/Rivet apparently holidayed in the Lakes and so… Still Waters.
Please don’t let all this murder and mayhem in the Lakes put you off. It’s really safe – the odd lost cellphone is about as bad as it gets. But then the English have a very successful habit of taking perfectly safe places – think Morse in Oxford, Vera Stanhope in Northumberland or Jimmy Perez on Shetland – and making them seething beds of vice, murder and intrigue. It seems the beautiful Lakes are no exception.
