Murder, she wrote
Frequently described as Britain's queen of crime, Minette Walters often uses the SouthWest as the backdrop for her award-winning novels. She talks about her fascination with people, way she loves Dorset, and recommends her favourite reads for a train journey
Being one of the world’s best-selling crime writers, Minette Walters is quite familiar with dark and murderous thoughts, but it’s difficult to imagine anything in the pleasant Dorset countryside that surrounds her inspiring such evil reflection.
Sitting in the large, airy study of her 17th-century manor house, just a few miles from Dorchester, Minette looks the epitome of cool, calm and collected. The scene is the perfect rural idyll, with peacocks calling from the orchard, racehorses whinnying in the neighbouring field, friendly chickens pecking by the French windows, and her two dogs, Benson and Hedges, snoozing at her feet.
As her fingertips glide over the computer keyboard every morning, however, the chances are that she’ll be immersed in a grisly world of machete wielders, decomposing corpses and instruments of torture. Getting into the minds of the warped and deranged is a skill that has won her millions of fans, umpteen prestigious writing awards, and seen half of her books turned into high-rating TV dramas, such as The Sculptress, starring Pauline Quirke.
After a day spent wallowing in a bloodbath, Minette has no trouble switching off as evening falls. She will often be found relaxing in a bubble bath, watching The Weakest Link or Countdown on the telly in her bathroom—one of her favourite indulgences (the others include buying chickens at auctions to rear at home, and a good bottle of St Emilion).
There are occasions, however, when this mistress of murder has homicidal thoughts of her own. Not often, mind you, but if you’re reading this in a Quiet Carriage on the Dorchester South to London Waterloo route with your mobile phone switched on, just hope that Minette isn’t sitting across the aisle.
“Mobile phones!” she groans, rolling her hazel eyes in despair. “I ab-so-lute-ly hate them on trains. Whenever I travel by rail, I buy about three newspapers to do all the crosswords and puzzle pages, but you can’t concentrate when someone is jabbering away in your ear. Ban mobiles, I say!”
Neither does Minette want the background babble of a mobile chinwag detracting from the view out of the train window. “I love going around Poole Harbour—that’s one of my favourite views in the entire train journey—and through the New Forest.”
One of her most fondly remembered train journeys was when she was working in London in her mid-20s and staying at her mother’s house in Basingstoke. “The nearest station was Hook, and because I was young, I was out partying every night—so I would take the last train home.
“Of course, I’d always nod off to sleep, and this lovely train driver, who worked the last train, would hop out of his cab at Hook and bang on the window to wake me up. I’d love to know who he was.”
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