Minette Walters

When you think about how slow travel was in those days, and yet this dreadful pestilence that it's reckoned killed 50% of the population, spread from Dorset throughout the British Isles in two years.

That includes Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

and 50% of the entire population of the whole country died.

Ah, well, when my husband and I bought our house in Dorset, which is four miles as the crow flies from Weymouth, the first thing we learned was that under our land, near where the 12th century church is, only buildings still standing from that time, is a plague pit.

And it was absolutely clear that my little village was completely wiped out very, very early on.

So within probably two or three weeks of it coming into Malcolm and I was, you cannot, I have dogs and I take them for, it's very difficult when you've learned a fact like that.

It's hard to just walk glibly around because you can see the mounds in the earth around the church where the medieval settlement was.

It's now a scheduled monument.

Nobody's allowed to dig in it or you're not allowed to touch it.

It's on our land and we really quite treasure it and the little church because it's so beautiful.

And to walk around there, it's very hard to do that and completely ignore this incredible tragedy that happened to the community seven centuries ago.

So I began conceiving the idea for the plot because I did want to write a story about human survival.

And so I began conceiving the idea.

And I think in a rather romantic way, I wanted to give names to the people in our village who had died, died without ever being known because no records were kept because all the priests and monks died and they were the scribes.

So there are very few records in England today.

from that period.

It's very hard to sort of research it in that sense.

So I thought it would be quite romantic to try and create, although in a different part of Dorset because Devilish is set further north.

I've set it further north than where we live.

But the idea of being able to create a community with names, I quite liked the idea of that.