"Death on Coffin Lane" by Jo Allen

It’s a mystery with an overlay of William Wordsworth. 

Cody Wilder is an American academic staying for some months at Grasmere, the home town of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. She has made a significant discovery with some letters relating to Wordsworth and his sister, and she’s there to do research and give a public lecture. She also attracts, and creates, controversy, and there have been a number of online threats made against her.

 

When her English research assistant is found hanging in her cottage kitchen, apparently a suicide, Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite of the Cumbria Police and his team handle the investigation. He takes an instant dislike to Wilder, as does the reader. She’s obnoxious at best, self-centered and opinionated, and she doesn’t think twice about lying to the police. Trying to create sympathy for her later in the story is going to fall flat; the reader won’t mind if something dastardly happens to her.

 

Then the body of a man in a nearby New Age encampment is found, more deaths are in the offing. Satterthwaite has his hands full. But the Wordsworth letters seem to be involved; someone is desperately searching for something and won’t stop at murder.

 

Jo Allen

Death on Coffin Lane is the third DCI Jude Satterthwaite mystery by British author Jo Allen. If you’re a Wordsworth fan, you’ll find yourselves treated to quotations, biographical information, literary speculation, and the atmosphere of Grasmere. 

 

Allen is a native of Wolverhampton, England, and has graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and earth science. After a career as an economic consultant, she began writing short stories, romance, and romantic suspense under the pen name of Jennifer Young. She began writing the DCI Satterthwaite crime novels in 2017.  

 

It’s a good mystery, but the drawing of the American academic is a bit overdone. Later in the story, when some sympathy is called for, she’s burned so many bridges with the reader that little if any will be forthcoming. That said, the character of Cody Wilder is a almost stereotype of controversial academics, and stereotypes will have some element of truth contained within them. 

 

Related:

 

Death by Dark Waters by Jo Allen.

 

Death at Eden’s End by Jo Allen. 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Murders for September – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Cowboy as Detective: Finding Charlie Siringo’s West – Nathan Ward at CrimeReads.

 

BFFs: The death of Leonora – short story by Vincent Marshall at On the 12^th.

 

Year of the Monarch: The Native Wildflowers Formerly Known as Weeds – Laura Boggess at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Salisbury Cathedral prepares for final ‘topping out’ after 37 years of repairs – Steven Morris at The Guardian. 

 

Dorothy L. Sayers and the Thirty-Foot Drain: Searching for Peter Wimsey – James Benn at CrimeReads.

 

"Death by Dark Waters" by Jo Allen

The weather in Cumbria has been dry – ideal for grassfires, both natural and set. After one fire, which engulfed part of an old, abandoned farm, a body is found. But it doesn’t appear to be a victim of the fire – the coroner determines the victim was dead before the fire.  

The victim is the 12-year-old son of a wealthy app developer, known for his online dating sites.

 

Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite of the Cumbria Police investigates with his team, including a new (and very attractive) detective sergeant. Satterthwaite is three years out from his divorce, and it doesn’t help that his ex-wife lives next door to his mother.

 

Jo Allen

The victim’s father has no use for the police; he’d almost been framed for a crime he didn’t commit by a former police officer in another part of England. He has his own security force at his mansion, which obviously didn’t help protect his family. But the family has secrets, and those secrets will send Satterthwaite and his officers down rabbit holes before they find they right one.

 

But before that, a second murder happens, and the suspects are getting increasingly few on the ground..

 

Death by Dark Waters is the first of eight DCI Satterthwaite mystery novels by British author Jo Allen. It’s a dark tale of passion, betrayal, and utterly ruthless business competition, one with innocent victims suffering the consequences. 

 

Allen is a native of Wolverhampton, England, and has graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and earth science. After a career as an economic consultant, he began writing short stories, romance, and romantic suspense under the pen name of Jennifer Young. She began writing the DCI Satterthwaite crime novels in 2017. 

Art and Poetry: “A Wider Landscape” by Donald Wilkinson

I found the artist Donald Wilkinson because I was looking for information on poet Jacob Polley. And finding Wilkinson was like finding William Wordsworth all over again.

It’s a reminder of how poetry becomes art becomes poetry.

Polley won the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2016, for his collection Jackself. It’s an unusual collection, mostly about childhood and utilizing many of the “Jacks” of childhood as the subjects for poems – Jack Frost, Jack Sprat, Jack O’Lantern, and the house that Jack built. While writing an article on the collection for Tweetspeak Poetry, I came across a reference to a poem Polley had written for a published collection of paintings and drawings by an artist named Donald Wilkinson.

Wilkinson, like Polley, is from the north of England, the area known as Cumbria and that we often refer to as the Lake Country. (Norman Nicholson is another poet from the area, one who wrote extensively on the landscape and the environment). Wilkinson, born in 1937, trained in Carlisle and London but is directly associated with “Wordsworth country.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph of Scafell Pike Mountain in Cumbria by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Norman Nicholson: Poetry of Landscape and the Environment

A few weeks back, as I was reading A Poet’s Guide to Britain, I discovered a poem by Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) called “Scafell Pike”. It is a landscape poem, but an unusual one, as it explores an industrial landscape imposed upon a natural landscape, but the industrial landscape is becoming a ruin and being reclaimed by nature.

In a sense, the poem is also a story poem, the story of the great industrialization of Britain in the 19^th century and the deindustrialization of Britain in the 20^th. Nicholson’s landscape was very specific – the region of Cumbria on the western side of England’s Lake District and butting up against the Irish Sea.

I looked for more poems by Nicholson, and found them. I looked for biographical information online, and found it. Then I went looking to see if I could find any of his poetry collections online, and I could. But few had been republished; generally, what’s available are used editions at various book shops in the UK. (some priced reasonably and some not).

One resource I did find was a biography written in 2013, Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet by Kathleen Jones. It was written at the request of the Norman Nicholson Society, and it’s available in Kindle format. It’s highly readable and covers Nicholson’s life and his works in detail.

To continue reading (and to read one of his beautiful poems), please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.