It was a pleasure to be invited to the UK Crime Book Club Live event in Leeds this weekend. The convention was a consistently jolly affair, with plenty of laughs considering the grim topics under discussion. In thirty years of writing I’ve only spoken on five panels, so it was a double pleasure to be part of a trio unearthing Archaeology and Crime.
Myra Duffy sets her series on the island of Bute, and made a point of saying it was always the nasty outsiders who turned out to be the villains. He son is an archaeologist so helps her keep the detail real. Susan Parry sets hers in the Yorkshire Dales, and with her background as a scientist makes science a key part of the investigations. In conversation we discovered that we must have worked together in 1981-82 when she was a professor at Imperial College and in charge of the Neutron Activation Analysis programme at their nuclear reactor. I travelled out there weekly to carry out my own NAA project on north Kent Roman pottery and she would have been the one handing back my samples and data.
A second coincidence is that both Susan and I have set stories around a fictional University of North Yorkshire archaeology department, although her campus is situated slightly further up the A1 than mine.
Caroline Maston deftly moderated the session. We enthused over the excitement of discovery in archaeology, the mysteries of the past and how these can slip into a crime plot. I took my hat and trowel along as props to illustrate a few digging anecdotes. Archaeologists are of course born investigators so we talked a good deal about science and techniques. We discussed the analysis of teeth from a skeleton in identifying where a person was born, plus esoteric factoids such as how identifying tiny land snails can show the environment a body was buried in. The audience wanted to know whether we liked Time Team and what we thought of inaccuracies in historical movies (fire arrows wind me up constantly) .
Read More: ‘Archaeologists as Fictional Heroes.’
With parallel sessions it was possible to attend three others, which carried a freshness as they featured many new faces not seen at more established events. A big thanks to the whole team at UKCBC and here’s hoping the event becomes a regular landmark on the UK convention circuit.
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