I've just read a new crime novel that uses the Shropshire Union Canal as a backdrop. Deborah Crombie's Water Like A Stone is a whodunit set around Nantwich and Barbridge, and provided me with several hours compelling reading, up to its slightly predictable - but still highly enjoyable - denouement.
It's the tenth in a series about Scotland Yard detective Duncan Kincaid and his partner Gemma James. This time they go up to Cheshire for a snowbound (well, it is fiction!) family Christmas at Kincaid's parents' home. This being a whodunit with family tensions, it's a far-from-peaceful holiday.
You can read the prologue and first chapter online.
It's so scrupulously researched - based on real places - that you'll be reaching for your OS maps and Nantwich streetmaps to follow the plot, and it all has a tremendous sense of place. The American edition has this brilliant map to guide you, but it's not in the UK edition I bought, which is a disappointment.
Sometimes it feels like she's crammed in extra canal research simply so as not to waste it, but perhaps she has an eye on the tourist trade. With this book and a streetmap of the area you could lay on a Duncan Kincaid Walking Tour Of Nantwich, with coach ride to a couple of outlying villages, all ending in a pleasant pint and re-created mummers' play at ye Olde Barbridge Inn (the new landlord will be delighted with the publicity) and selling the punters assorted books and canalware 'as featured in Water Like A Stone'.
The book doesn't quite count as pure 'waterways literature' because the main characters only stumble on the canals (or die on them) and don't really use them to go anywhere. I'd rather see them cruise from place to place, the way Leo McNeir has them do, although Debbie Crombie certainly gets her waterways facts right. Surprisingly she's a native-born Texan, still living and writing there, although she lived in Chester at one time. On her website she writes:
When I lived in Chester I spent many hours exploring the Cheshire countryside, and fell in love with the small and unspoiled market town of Nantwich in southern Cheshire. Then, several years later, when I was creating background for Duncan in the first novel, A Share in Death, I gave him Nantwich as his home town. It has, however, taken me ten books to get him back there, but it was well worth the wait. It was only when I revisited the area and began the preliminary research that I fell in love with the Shropshire Union Canal, and that, in turn, led to a passion for narrowboats and the history of the Inland Waterways—a passion I hope you will share.
This is the second modern novel I've read this year that uses the long pause of Christmas to drive the action. Katie Fforde's The Rose Revived (amongst many others) also used this plot device.
The age of the mobile phone and the 24hr supermarket - which allows anyone to contact anyone else and get whatever they want whenever they choose - causes problems for plot-writers, who need their characters to be out of touch occasionally. A modern Christmas often separates friends, closes businesses and offices for a few days and drives up family tensions. This allows characters to lose touch with what's going on outside their family, and new plot twists can thus be introduced. Water Like A Stone benefited from this because it conveniently delayed identification of the first body for a few days. Even pathology labs, it seems, close for Christmas.
An ocean-going fishing boat, worth more than £100,000, has been abandoned in Gloucester Docks. British Waterways is planning to sell off the oak-lined Johanna Lucretia if her owner does not come forward soon. Paul Griffin, from British Waterways, said: "We've tried all our known sources. If the owner is out there, we'd like to talk to him."
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