De Vries

My blog tour is more than half way through now. I’d like to thank all the bloggers and everyone who has read their posts and sent comments. Both the reviews and the comments have been delightful – I am hugely appreciative and grateful. Thank you!

I’m now looking forward to the last three posts. The tour finishes on 30^th November – a fitting date, as winter starts ‘officially’ the next day. I’m sure the generous and perspicacious posts will encourage more readers to snuggle down with DI Yates in the cold, dark evenings!

Special thanks to Anne Cater, who pulled the whole thing together. I have loved working with her – she is down-to-earth, determined and efficient and she has a fine sense of humour. If you are looking for someone to organise a blog tour, I wholeheartedly recommend her.

De Vries, my latest novel, is published today. It makes a more tentative entry into the world than my other books, emerging cautiously, like us, as the lockdown restrictions are gradually relaxed… and I  must say I can’t wait to visit some bookshops next week! Not being able to go to bookshops and talk to booksellers has been one of the greatest privations of this latest lockdown – for thousands of others, I know, as well as for me. Unlike all my other books, therefore, De Vries cannot be launched in a bookshop. However, Carla Green and Alison Swainson at BBC Radio Lincolnshire have kindly offered De Vries a virtual book launch on the Carla Green programme today. If you are able to, please tune in at 15.10, with your glasses charged! There are some library and bookshop events planned for later in the year and I’ll keep everyone posted.

De Vries has already been blessed by several kind and perspicacious reviewers who read it ahead of publication date. I include some of their reviews in this post. I’d like to thank you, Stacey, Mickey and Jane, for taking the time and the trouble to write such brilliant reviews. I appreciate them hugely.

I also include some photos of the Sakura (cherry) blossom, sent to me by my friend and colleague Katsunori Iino, who lives in Shiga, Japan. The ancient Japanese Hanami ritual celebrates the fleeting beauty of this blossom of a species of ornamental cherry. The ancient Japanese sages compared the precious short-lived splendour of these flowers with life itself and believed both should be enjoyed to the full before they slip away. I hope they’ll bring the readers of this blog some calm and joy as we all begin to embrace life to the full once more – and we shall, I’m sure, still find plenty of time to read!

Reviews of De Vries

From Stacey Haber:

I loved this book. A quick read and intriguing from start to finish.

It’s not your typical murder mystery in that it doesn’t open with a dead body and the central character sleuth. It opens with a mystery, just not the one we’re expecting. If you’ve not read its predecessor Sausage Hall, then you’re greeted with a man who knows he’s at risk and in a place he shouldn’t be. You are immediately propelled to the edge of your seat and the tension of a good mystery stays with you from page one. If you have read Sausage Hall, then the mysteries of ‘why’ and ‘why now’ are all the more present and shocking. 

The web of characters in this story resonates with purpose. The introduction of the many characters takes the time deserved and the unfolding of the story is like a film camera slowing pulling back to reveal that web. It’s a glorious reveal in slow motion with rich detail and intrigue.

When the protagonist and side kick DI Tim Yates and DS Juliet Armstrong finally appear, it’s a relief; a relief that things will all become clear soon and that the characters that we care about have a chance of a resolution, even if not a happy ending. Yates and Armstrong are wonderfully pragmatic and determined. Armstrong in particular has a mind that is a joy to follow and an instinct for detail that would be lost on anyone else.

Can’t wait for the next instalment in the DI Yates series.

From Mickey Corrigan:

Hijinks at Sausage Hall: De Vries by Christina James

When Kevan de Vries returns to the family home in Sutterton, South Lincolnshire, he knows he is taking a huge risk. He’s wanted by the local police for questioning in the disappearance of his former employee, a man accused of running of a child trafficking ring. De Vries’ attorney, the manipulative Ms Jean Rook, has power of attorney in more ways than the usual. And there are some ghosts he must confront. His dead wife, for one. The missing trafficker. Not to mention some hundred-year-old skeletons the police dug up in the cellar.

There’s much at stake, but de Vries is bored living on the lam in St. Lucia, idling his time while avoiding extradition and waiting for his son Archie’s school recess. Thus, his return to ‘Laurieston House’ (which the locals call ‘Sausage Hall’, in reference to the butcher who went bankrupt building it) and the dangers it represents, the demons he must face. He’s also on a quest. Not to clear his name, but to discover its secrets. His birth certificate lists his father as “unknown” and de Vries is determined to fill in the blanks.

Agnes Price is worried about one of her young students from the seasonal workers’ camp. Mirela Sala is underfed, underdressed, and bears other signs of abuse when Agnes takes her under her wing. But Mirela’s scary “uncle” takes offense, which leads to violence and threats of more. Already stressed from a previous run-in with a stalker, Agnes struggles to maintain her composure while distracting herself with a project for the local Archeological Society. That’s where de Vries meets her – and rather quickly falls for her.

DI Yates and DS Armstrong, the likeable cops involved in the child trafficking bust, are back on the job. (If you are a Christina James fan, you will recognize these characters from the DI Yates series.) Drawn in by the possibility that de Vries is hiding out at Sausage Hall, they launch another one of their intuition based investigations, only to get sidetracked when a townswoman goes missing.

Will de Vries solve his paternity mystery before the law finds him? Will he be able to explain his legal troubles to Agnes? Is the child trafficker dead—or still in business? What will the Archeological Society dig up? And where did those old skeletons at Sausage Hall come from? Are there more?

Enquiring minds must find out, which is why I couldn’t stop reading. I greatly admire a writer who can lure me in with an addictive plot and make me fall in love with a motley group of well-drawn characters as she fits all the puzzle pieces together. I won’t say more as I don’t want to spoil your read. It’s a fun one by a master storyteller.

From Jane Barber:

Kevan De Vries has spent seven years living in St Lucia and has decided to return to his home in Sutterton. The police are still interested in questioning him about his business manager’s disappearance and involvement in  criminal activity. Kevan would prefer not to answer their questions so decides to travel incognito.

He needs to spend time at his old family home of ‘Sausage Hall’ to try and find out any information about his father. His mother and grandfather never would answer his questions.

Sausage Hall has a lot of secrets – is it about to divulge some more? And what connection is there with the crimes that DI Yates and his team are investigating?

I had wondered what had happened to Kevan De Vries – this time he is the one looking for answers and finding himself attracting unwanted attention. I liked the different narratives of de Vries and the police and found myself hoping he escaped safely back to St Lucia.

The local Lincolnshire settings are so well described and enhance the story so well. I can visualise all the places mentioned.

An excellent read.

Thank you once again, Stacey, Mickey and Jane, for such perceptive and tantalising reviews. I very much appreciate them.

May I wish everyone a rapid escape from the restrictions that the pandemic continues to impose and enduring good health and happiness thereafter.

This is the third in the series of posts about De Vries.  It explores the role of ‘Sausage Hall’ in the novel, particularly whether the house itself can have influenced the course of events that take place.

Buildings fascinate because they are so much part of the era in which they were built – which means that, to a greater or lesser extent, almost everyone lives within some construct of the past. Buildings are also the backdrop to the events that take place within them. Can they remember these events, perhaps even absorb some quintessential miasma from them? It hardly seems fanciful to think so – such a belief is sometimes even embraced by officialdom. Thus, Gloucestershire Council in 1996, shortly after the conviction of Fred and Rosemary West, razed to the ground 25 Cromwell Street, scene of many horrific murders, ostensibly to stop souvenir hunters but also because its continued existence gave local people ‘the creeps’; and the council house where Myra Hindley lived with her grandmother and Ian Brady, where they murdered Edward Evans, was also demolished, though, curiously, only twenty-two years after Hindley and Brady were imprisoned. Manchester Council eventually found it impossible to let the house because successive tenants complained of a ‘dreadful sense of brooding’ there. Imagination or fact?

As a child, I visited Hardwick Hall – built by Bess of Hardwick, the ancestress of the Dukes of Devonshire – before it was taken over by the National Trust. Despite the famous adage ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’, the house at that time was dark and chilly and neither very clean nor in a good state of repair. There weren’t many visitors on that day – I think it was in early spring, probably just after the house had been opened up after the winter – and I was dawdling behind my parents. They had disappeared beyond the top of the shallow-stepped stone staircase that led to the first floor by the time I began to climb it myself. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that I was quite alone. I carried on up the steps – I was looking to my right at a large faded tapestry on the wall, apparently woven in greys and browns – when something brushed against my shoulder and my leg. It was soft, a fabric of some kind. In less than a second it had passed me. When I looked back at the foot of the staircase again, I caught a glimpse of a woman in a long, dark dress smartly walking away. Although subsequently no-one believed me, I was convinced that I had seen Bess herself. Had some essence of her survived, fostered perhaps by the sheer force of her personality? Had her spirit been left free to roam when her descendants decamped to the even grander house they built at Chatsworth? Since the National Trust took over the property, I have visited the house several more times, but never again felt any inkling of an uncanny presence there. Is that because in the process of undertaking much necessary restoration work, the National Trust has ‘sanitised’ it? (Like every other NT house, it now has a tea-room, a gift shop, cordons to keep you off the furniture and attendants everywhere.) Or is it because children really can see and feel almost imperceptible elemental forces that adults can no longer detect? I still don’t believe I imagined the whole thing.

When Kevan de Vries leaves Sutterton in a hurry at the end of Sausage Hall, he has come to detest the house, the location of some of the unhappiest events in his life. Even more sinisterly, he has discovered that it was the scene of much evil-doing in the past. Yet when he returns to it incognito seven years later, as well as his quest to discover his father’s identity it is the house itself that draws him. His fascination is in part empirical: he knows there is a large number of papers and artefacts stored within the house that are likely to yield clues about his paternity. But there is more to it than that: at some level, he feels that the house, scene of his childhood, youth and married years, carries a part of himself, however much he may have tried to deny it during his exile in St Lucia.

Perhaps that is the great collective secret shared by all buildings once they have been inhabited: like light years, they don’t just exist in the present, but within a continuum reaching right back to their foundation. They face both forwards and backwards: they absorb and are shaped by the loves, fears and hatreds of those who have occupied them. They have characters, sometimes charming, sometimes terrible. As they grow older, their personality changes: they possess their own powerful kind of DNA, incremental rather than fixed. They become companions, not just enclosures of living space. Kevan de Vries is the central human character in De Vries; but in every step he takes he is shadowed, perhaps even influenced, by Sausage Hall.

As I said in my previous post, De Vries has three major themes: whether murder can ever be justified, why some people are prepared to risk everything to discover who their parents are/were and the secrets held by old houses.

Today, I’d like to take a closer look at the second theme. Why is it that a significant proportion of people who cannot identify their birth parents – such as those who have been adopted, or whose parents have been lost in war or some other catastrophe, or who have experienced the denial of parenthood by one parent (usually the father), or who are the offspring of a sperm donor or even who have been abandoned in early infancy – grow up with an insatiable desire to discover who their biological parents were, while others in a similar situation either display no interest in finding out or are actively hostile to the idea?

My first boss and his wife had three adopted children, each with different biological parents from the others. They were adopted in the 1960s, when adoptive parents had minimal contact with the biological parents and the latter had very limited rights. Adoption societies of the time made it clear that they were facilitating a ‘clean break’ from the natural parent (usually the mother) who had offered the child for adoption. Often the mothers were very young and coerced into giving away their babies by the demands of their parents and the disapproval of society as a whole. It was considered shameful to be an unmarried mother and the welfare state did little to help girls and women who found themselves in this predicament. The prospective mothers were often sent to unmarried mothers’ homes when they began to ‘show’. Spalding had such a home, Carisbrooke House in Haverfield Road. The girls who came to it were probably from other towns; similarly, Spalding girls would be sent to towns some distance away. Soon after the birth, the baby was adopted and the girls would return home as if nothing had happened – though the experience cruelly curtailed their education and there was little psychological support for the trauma of having had to relinquish the child. The headmistress of Spalding High School was considered to be very progressive for allowing one of my classmates to return to school after she had a baby. The year was 1969.

My boss’s two adopted sons showed no interest whatsoever in their biological parents. Like Kevan de Vries, they entered the family business at a young age and enjoyed the privileged lifestyle and well-heeled standard of living it offered. His adoptive daughter felt differently. She went to huge lengths to track down her biological mother and eventually settled in the USA, where her mother had emigrated, and changed her name to the name her mother had entered on her birth certificate. Despite having been brought up in a loving and affluent household, just like the two boys, she was never able to identify with the adoptive family.

During the same period, issues of parentage frequently became more convoluted, not to say dishonest, when the woman was older and married to a man who was not the father of the child. Divorce carried a stigma almost as powerful as unmarried motherhood, so few women would choose it; on a more practical level, most divorcees and abandoned wives were forced to live in penury. This was decades before British law changed and became almost always in favour of the woman if she had children and Britain became the ‘divorce capital of the world’. The alimony awarded by courts was usually meagre and little attempt was made to force defaulting husbands to pay.

A woman who bore a child whom she knew or suspected not to be her husband’s therefore commonly passed the baby off as his. Some husbands were complicit, knowing the child not to be theirs but still preferring to raise it as their own rather than end the marriage; others were genuinely taken in by the wife’s claims. As an adult, a friend suspected that the child of one of her neighbours was in fact her half-brother. The boy was small and fine-boned, with tight black curls like her own and those of her two siblings. The mother was a tall, heavily-built woman with fair skin and hair whose other children all looked like her. My friend later discovered that it had been an open secret in the neighbourhood that this boy was her father’s, but the woman’s husband had accepted responsibility for his upbringing and treated him exactly like the others.

In the 1950s and 1960s, some early efforts were made to identify fathers reluctant to acknowledge their children and make them contribute to their maintenance. Proving paternity was, however, largely based on the results of blood tests: it was possible to prove that a man was definitively not the child’s father, but, unless he had a very rare blood group, not to prove conclusively that he was.

The advent of the much more reliable DNA tests – though the earliest ones were not as reliable as claimed at the time – helped women to assert who the child’s father was, be believed and consequently obtain financial support, which became much more robustly enforced by the law than previously. Even more crucial, however, was the shift, from the 1970s onwards, in social attitudes towards parenthood. Gradually the stigma of being born outside wedlock was removed. More and more couples elected to have children without marrying and if they subsequently split up they were much more likely to agree on joint care – or at least joint financial support – for the children.

Kevan de Vries is fifty when De Vries begins.  During his lifetime, the whole spectrum of social attitudes towards children not born to a conventionally married couple takes place. Viewed in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that as a young man he is happy to have his mother and grandfather sweep the question of his paternity under the carpet, whereas in middle age he develops a burning desire to understand the identity of his missing parent, even at the risk of losing his liberty and physical contact with his own son.

A brief footnote: John and Limming were the first and middle names of one of my close relatives. His mother named him after her own eldest brother, who was gassed in the First World War, and the father who refused to acknowledge him. She was determined that he would carry his father’s last name in some form, even though it was denied to him as a surname. He spent his whole life hating it and would omit it from official documents whenever possible.

De Vries, the ninth DI Yates novel, will be published soon. As I mentioned in a previous post, it is the sequel to Sausage Hall, although each can be read independently of the other.

De Vries sets out to explore several themes: Why do some people become obsessed with discovering the truth about who their parents are, even at the risk of putting themselves in danger or losing their liberty? Can murder sometimes be justified? And, perhaps a little more whimsically, can buildings hide secrets and even, in certain contexts, develop personalities of their own?

In a future post, I’ll take a closer look at the mystery of parentage. For now, I’d like to consider the second of these themes. Wishing to find out more about whether murder can ever be excused, I looked up the term ‘justifiable homicide’. Unsurprisingly, I discovered that in different countries there is quite a range of legislation ‘allowing’ murder (i.e., not prosecuting the perpetrator). Internationally, the most frequently invoked law is one that absolves the murderer of blame if s/he killed while fearing for her or his own life, or the life of someone else in the immediate vicinity.  In other words, the murder has been committed in self-defence. However, the precise definition of what legally constitutes self-defence is often unclear. For example, English law allows someone to exert only ‘reasonable force’ when defending property from an intruder, even if the intruder is trespassing in the middle of the night and the householder claims that s/he was terrified. The well-publicised case of Tony Martin, who shot dead a teenage boy and injured his twenty-nine-year-old burglar companion when they broke into his remote farmhouse in the early hours of one morning in the year 2000, remains controversial. Martin was convicted of murder, later downgraded to manslaughter. He served three years in prison before being released. Twenty years on, public opinion is still divided on whether he should have been convicted at all, but his conviction was the result of careful application of the law. The plea of self-defence therefore seems to depend on a number of factors, including the circumstances of death, how the law may or should be interpreted, the verdict of the jury if the perpetrator is taken to court and, finally, the views of the presiding judge.

Some countries allow or condone types of killing that others would not hesitate to regard as murder. Abortion and euthanasia are allowed by some western jurisdictions, condemned as murder by others. So-called ‘honour-killings’, while they may still be against the law, may attract lower sentences than other kinds of homicide in the countries where they are most commonly practised. (I take a closer look at honour killings in Rooted in Dishonour.) Perpetrators of ‘crimes of passion’ – i.e., murders committed in the heat of the moment, usually against a partner or spouse who has been caught ‘cheating’ or his or her lover – may sometimes be judged leniently, even sympathetically, especially in Latin countries, and a much-reduced sentence consequently handed down.

Whatever one’s stance on this, the logic that dictates that not all murders are equal when it comes to assigning culpability is not hard to understand, even though it is often controversial. But what if the murderer were under no particular pressure when s/he committed the murder? Would it make any difference to the degree of culpability in terms of, say, such a (possibly extenuating?) circumstance as being unexpectedly accosted – perhaps at home – by someone who might not have been at that moment an obvious direct threat, but who had previously inflicted personal – or close-to-personal – harm on him or her? And what if the victim were a totally reprehensible character with no counterbalancing virtues whatsoever? Could the case ever be made for letting the murderer of such a person go scot free, with his or her crime condoned or even tacitly approved by the authorities?

That was the conundrum I had to address when I started to write De Vries.

De Vries is the sequel to Sausage Hall, the third in the DI Yates series and among the most popular. It will be published in March. It is indelibly etched on my memory as having been written during the first year of COVID. I’m sure many other writers will have particular memories of what they wrote in 2020.

Readers of Sausage Hall have been asking for a sequel ever since it appeared in 2014. I have found their enthusiasm uplifting and should like to take the opportunity to thank them for it.  As soon as Sausage Hall was published, I knew I would write its sequel one day, because the story of Kevan de Vries is far from finished when it ends. Seven years after the curtain went down on de Vries, now exiled to his luxury home in Marigot Bay, it seemed the time was ripe, not least because the seven-year gap features strongly in the plot and is instrumental in deciding de Vries’ fate.

All the DI Yates novels prior to De Vries are standalone. Although the same central characters appear in all of them and some of the minor characters feature in more than one, De Vries was my first attempt at writing a novel whose plot depended on the plot of an earlier book. After giving this a great deal of thought, I decided that I wanted De Vries to work as a standalone novel as well as a sequel – I always feel those authors who expect their readers to read novels 1 – 8 in order to understand novel 9 are cheating. This presented some interesting challenges which I hope I have managed to address successfully, mainly through the use of ‘need-to-know’ tasters. There are snippets of information about what happened in Sausage Hall dotted throughout De Vries – enough, I hope, not to fox or bore the reader – without spoiling Sausage Hall for those who come to it afterwards.

I’ve previously told readers of this blog how my eagle-eyed daughter-in-law picks me up on discrepancies of fact and characterisation between the novels. Spotting and eliminating such errors seemed even more vital this time. She and my editor both re-read Sausage Hall before embarking upon De Vries and I re-read it several times myself – the first time I have read one of my novels all the way through again after it was published.

As it happens, I remembered the plot and characters of Sausage Hall quite accurately, more so, perhaps than some of the more recent DI Yates novels. Nevertheless, re-reading it was an unusual experience because it also reminded me vividly of the specific occasions on which I worked on certain chapters. For example, it was during one of many court adjournments when I was doing jury service at Sheffield Crown Court that I read of the links to Lincolnshire of a famous historical character that gave me the idea for the sub-plot; I was on holiday in Germany when I started writing about Florence Hoyle’s journal. The German holiday house was on a farm in the Munsterland and I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop, the brilliant sunshine streaming through the open door. (Less edifyingly, I was also eating banana cake.)

De Vries himself is one of the most complex characters I have tried to create. He’s not exactly likeable, but he is charismatic; the reader feels sympathy for him because he’s suffered more than his fair share of misfortune – but he brought much of it on himself. Is he a murderer, or has he been framed? I won’t say any more, because I don’t want to spoil it if you’re interested!

I don’t have the finished jacket for De Vries yet, but I will post it on this blog as soon as I can. I’m thrilled with it – it’s an original sketch by Sophie Ground, a very talented artist friend and daughter of my friend Madelaine, herself also an accomplished artist.

I’m also delighted that all the Yates novels except Almost Love – which I’m rewriting; it will be back again in the autumn – are now published by QuoScript, a vibrant new publisher specialising in crime and YA fiction.

I may not have the jacket yet, but I can share the blurb from the back cover.  I hope you find it intriguing!

Wealthy businessman Kevan de Vries returns to the UK after an enforced absence, travelling incognito and taking up residence at ‘Sausage Hall’, his ancestral home in Sutterton – secretly, because he must evade being questioned by DI Yates about the disappearance of Tony Sentance seven years previously. Sentance’s sister Carole persistently lobbies the police to have her brother declared dead so she can inherit his estate. She believes de Vries murdered Tony.

De Vries knows he risks imprisonment by coming home, but he’s obsessed with learning his father’s identity, never disclosed by his mother.

Agnes Price, a young primary teacher, becomes increasingly concerned about the welfare of one of the children in her class. Leonard Curry, a schools attendance officer, is sent to investigate, but is attacked. Someone frightens Agnes when she is walking home one night. Shortly afterwards, Audrey Furby, Curry’s niece, disappears… 

De Vries is the sequel to Sausage Hall; each novel can be read independently of the other.