Cornish Mysteries series by Katherine Stansfield


I have to admit to knowing the author of these wonderful novels: Katherine was my tutor in the second year of the Open University Masters in Creative Writing (I graduated in December 2020 with a Distinction – yay!).  And, yes, that’s why I read the first book, Falling Creatures – well, it always pays to familiarise yourself with your tutor’s work, doesn’t it? Katherine was a brilliant tutor, BUT I would not be writing this if I didn’t also think she was a brilliant novelist. In fact, I’m sad that I hadn’t come across her work before I did the course, as I think it deserves to be more widely known.

I have deliberately waited until well after the course ended and all my work has been marked before posting this, so that there can be no suspicion of my having any ulterior motive in praising these books, which are pictured in order below:

 

The novels are essentially historical detective stories, but they undermine many of the genre’s familiar tropes. For one thing, the investigative duo are women – the cross-dressing Anna Blake and her interestingly alcoholic and rather downtrodden sidekick, Shilly, who narrates the stories. This unconventional pairing is a kind of homage to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, which are of course narrated by Watson, but it also subverts this relationship. Where Holmes is ultra-confident, preternaturally correct in his fabulous deductions, and rather well-to-do and well-respected, Anna is female and rather lower down the social scale, sexually ambivalent, less moneyed and less urban. She does share the famous detective’s penchant for disguising herself, however. And where Watson is slightly bumbling, a sportsman, professional, ex-military, honest and utterly reliable, Shilly is from a very humble background, a domestic servant, often mentally confused due to her drinking problem, poorly educated, superstitious and credulous. Both women are rendered powerless in some ways by their gender and class, but they are more able to inveigle their way into worlds which might have been closed books to Sherlock. Shilly in particular has the gift of making friends with people.

The novels play around with sexuality and gender, both in the cross-dressing and the tentative on-and-off sexual relationship between Anna and Shilly. Their friendship is interesting and well-drawn, developing as their story progresses through the novels. Dialogue in particular is convincing, and their characters are vividly drawn. Shilly’s voice as the narrator is spot-on – her naivete and world-weariness, her innocence and experience, her lack of knowledge of so many things and yet her understanding of human nature, is pitch-perfect. Yet it was the atmosphere of the novels that first caught my attention. I began reading Falling Creatures with no particular expectations and no intention other than to sample my tutor’s own writing, but I was rapidly drawn in and read the subsequent books simply because I enjoyed their distinctive, slightly off-kilter magic.

Part of this ‘atmosphere’ is down to Shilly’s status as an unreliable narrator – she uses euphemisms for her drinking, and her belief in the occult leads to a blurring between the ‘real world’ and the world of her imagination – how much of the ‘supernatural’ elements of the stories are simply down to alcohol-induced hallucinations or delusions, and how much are real? This edginess, this uncertainty, pervades all three books and adds an extra layer of mystery to the events that unfold.

Stansfield is an expert at creepy. These aren’t novels that are in the ‘Horror’ genre or the ‘Fantasy’ genre, but they definitely contain chilling moments. Stansfield is adept at creating scenarios in which the reader begins to see the world through Shilly’s eyes, a world of tragedy, hardship, ghosts and witches. The ‘supernatural’ elements are all explained away, but not quite as fully as a different sort of writer might do – there is always the sense that there is more to these experiences than the brusque and sceptical Anna (the Scully to Shilly’s Mulder) will admit. As the story-teller, Shilly has the power she doesn’t have in her ‘real’ life – she can influence our perception of what we are reading. And at times the world of the novel is distinctly eerie – I once read The Magpie Tree in bed, on my kindle with the lights off, and I found myself pulling the blankets up round my chin and jumping when the blind rattled in the breeze! The books aren’t Stephen-King-terrifying, but they certainly generate a powerful sense of unease at times.

Stansfield, who was brought up in Cornwall, conveys the slight weirdness of this county that has always seen itself as slightly separate from mainstream England. She is writing about the 1940s, a period that seems now quite alien to our modern sensibilities, and she allows herself some leeway in her presentation of characters – they are both of their time and, occasionally, slightly anachronistic, but they are always real and convincing, which I feel is the hallmark of great writing. Stansfield's versatility can be seen in her range of writing - she writes novels in several genres and is also a talented poet.

 
You can find Katherine Stansfield at:  https://katherinestansfield.blogspot.com/     

 

RATING:

Cornish Fiction series

*****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way