Minette Walters

Well, funny enough, actually, I think crime writers make good historical fiction writers because you need the same qualities.

You need to have an analytical mind.

So the same skills that allows you to create a murder mystery, if you like, which does require quite a lot of analysis, research in order to get your details right, are exactly the same skills that you need to understand a historical period properly.

and then build a story set in that period.

So there are a lot of similarities.

I think the historical fiction requires more research there, unless you already are very well acquainted with the period.

But that's the fun part, or at least I found it the fun part, doing the research.

That is true.

I mean, in the sense that... But I suppose what I would say, though, is that certainly The Last Hours, which is the first one, in a sense that is a very claustrophobic environment.

So though there are more people in the story, because there are 200 people living in very cramped conditions inside a moat,

endorse it to try and keep the pestilence out.

The story focuses on still only really a handful of people and it's only when the pestilence is beginning to pass

And Thaddeus Thurkle has the courage to go out from devilish, from his domain, to find out what's happening beyond their boundaries.

That in a sense, I bring more people in.

But I still think, you know, it is quite a small cast of characters, and very deliberately so, because the contemporary chroniclers at the time wrote that only one in ten of the people of Dorset survived.

We're in 1348, so mid-14th century.

We're in Dorset in England, where the Black Death first came into England.

It landed, came in on a French ship.

that came into the port of Weymouth which was then called Melcombe and from there within about three months it had spread throughout Dorset and into the neighbouring counties and within six months it had spread across the entire south of England

Within two years, it had reached every single part of the British Isles, which is staggering to think about.