Murder Your Darlings Dreckly!

As writers, we all know the agony of editing and erasing some of your favourite prose.



The phrase "Murder your darlings!" was coined by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch (“Q”), compiler of the Oxford Book of English Verse and a host of novels about his native Cornwall.

  A quick check on Wikipedia gives a list of 45 books associated with Cornwall. Lots of familiar names, too.



The list is dominated by Winston Graham, and the Poldark series, (the man solely responsible for the recent surge of interest in scything!) and by Daphne du Maurier, surely the doyen of Cornish authors. There are many others though. Enid Blyton set her “Mallory Towers” series of school novels in Cornwall.

Back in Victorian times, RM Ballantyne gave us “Deep Down! A tale of the Cornish mines.” A very readable story and the result of three months he spent at the Botallack in St Just. Coincidently, and a nice example of "what goes around, comes around," Deep Down is the title of a recent Jack Reacher story.

Rosamunde Pilcher hit a literary gold mine with The Shell Seekers; Victoria Holt, Mary Wesley and Susan Howatch too have fallen under the “Kernow Spell”

So why? What is it that brings these amazing authors to write of Cornwall?

For me, it’s the atmosphere. I find that the land and sea, the mines and manor houses, cast a spell. Its as if a parallel world exists when you cross the Tamar.

Many modern authors have set their stories there and use the land or its history as a foundation for their stories, including Victoria Cornwall, one of the Novel Point of View bloggers. I read her first novel – The Thief’s Daughter and loved it. An excellent historical romance adventure, and packed with bona fide detail! .

This is a county where history and legend can be found around every corner, and in every glade in the woods and every cove and bay along the coast. It’s a coast that has seen every phase of history from Phoenician traders coming for tin to make bronze, through raids by African pirates seeking slaves, the mining of tin, copper, arsenic and china clay, the rise and fall of a massive coastal fishing industry based on pilchards, flowers, farms and American soldiers and sailors for the invasion of France in WWII, and now a massive and growing tourist industry.

Some authors make the county their own. Liz Fenwick, American by birth, is now, according to the Guardian, “An award-winning author of eight novels, dubbed 'the queen of the contemporary Cornish novel' “ Her latest novel, The River Between Us, has just been awarded the Popular Romantic Fiction Award by the Romantic Novelists Association..

And so to come right up to date with the myriad of modern authors, across all genres and tropes who succumb to the mystic charms of this multifaceted corner of the country. Check out Melanie Hudson, Jane Johnson, Phillipa Ashley, Mandy James, Kate Ryder, Kitty Wilson! They and others ALL weave their tales using Cornwall’s magic to set their scenes, and very well done, too.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley Cornwall again,” and we are off there on holiday in a couple of weeks!