Stig Abell

Stig Abell believes that discovering a crime fiction series to enjoy is one of the great pleasures in life. His first novel, Death Under A Little Sky, introduced Jake Jackson and his attempt to get away from his former life in the beautiful area around Little Sky, followed by Death in a Lonely Place and The Burial Place. Abell is absolutely delighted that there are more on the way. Away from books, he presents the breakfast show on Times Radio, a station he helped to launch in 2020. Before that he was a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row and was the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think The Burial Place is a fairly, and straightforwardly, descriptive title. Location is a central character in my story, and indeed the whole series in which Jake Jackson investigates murders in the depths of the British countryside. I've found that my working titles never make it to the book itself - I am too whimsical, publishers are (rightly) commercially-minded. Titles are almost the last thing that get agreed in my experience.

The Burial Place is set on an archaeological dig, and I called it "The Dig" as my working title. I then entered into a protracted discussion into whether the published title should have "Death" in it (the first two books of the series were respectively called "Death Under a Little Sky" and "Death in a Lonely Place"). I'm fond of series with threaded titles - I think of the colours in John D. Macdonald's wonderful tales about Travis McGee, or Kathy Reichs and her "Bones" - but I do think they can be a bit limiting. I plumped for The Unquiet Land for this one, with the whiff of fugitive poeticism about it. The publishers wanted it more prosaic, and that's fine with me.

What's in a name?

This is the third book of a series, so I am stuck with many of the names I've already come up with. I wanted my hero to be pleasingly alliterative, and Jake has been my favourite literary name since I read Fiesta by Hemingway when I was 14. His girlfriend is named after a Roman empress, for no good reason, other than I think it adds a touch of class to her (I'm in love with her more than a little myself). A main character in The Burial Place is a woman of Indian heritage called Daisy, given an English name by her parents to help her fit in. She resents this, and it gets to the heart of her sense of belonging, which is vital to the story. My mum had an Asian friend called Daisy, real name Harmeet, so I plucked that from real life.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Books were the most important part of my childhood. I read to escape, to learn, to be thrilled and challenged and entertained. I am the last of the pre-technological generation (I got my first email at 18, my first phone at 21), so the last also of the generation for whom books could be the dominant cultural experience. With that in mind, my teenage self would be simply thrilled that I was joining a genre - crime fiction - that had given me such joy, the genre of Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, and on and on. And surprised that I'd worked my way somehow into print myself.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I'm a bit of a planner, so I tend to have a beginning, a middle and an end in mind when I start - with a few big plot beats along the way. My favourite part of writing is the climax, which I do quickly and hungrily (the same way I read them, desperate for the final conclusion). I often then need to slow it down a bit in the second draft (it's a regular note I get from my editors), to obscure some of my own eagerness.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

This is a dangerous question for a novelist, who never wants to admit to being limited in their creativity or having a dearth of inspiration. I started writing Jake Jackson during Covid, when I became preoccupied - as we all did - with questions of proximity and mortality, the sense of the modern world closing in and intruding - via technology - upon all parts of our existence. Jake has the chance to leave the city, leave behind his phone, and live more freely, closer to nature. In that sense, he is a fantasy extension of my urban self, a bit of an idealisation. He is also hairy and scruffy, which I undoubtedly am too.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My novels are tributes to the beauty of the natural world, which are a consistent inspiration. So I spend plenty of time on the textures and sights and smells of the rural landscape. The Burial Place is also testament to the inexorable return of the past, the power of history. I use as an epitaph a magnificent line from the historian G M Trevelyan, which gets to the heart of the wonder of living in a small, old country, where every step you take has been trodden before by a nameless ancestor:

"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow".

In the end, The Burial Place is my tribute, I guess, to the poetry of history.

Follow Stig Abell on Instagram and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue