Great mystery novels set in 1950s England by Pauline Rowson

 

DEATH IN THE COVE, DEATH IN THE HARBOUR and DEATH IN THE NETS are set in 1950s Britain featuring my thoughtful Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alun Ryga who is sent out to investigate baffling coastal crimes around Britain.  My other twenty-one crime novels are all contemporary with fifteen featuring my rugged and flawed Portsmouth based detective, DI Andy Horton; four mystery thrillers with action-man former Royal Marine Commando Art Marvik, an undercover investigator for the UK’s Police National Intelligence Marine Squad, and two standalone thrillers.

When I first started writing novels many years ago they were in fact historical sagas. As I wrote more of them I kept finding a criminal element creeping into the story line. None of those novels have ever been published and after many rejections I turned to writing contemporary crime novels. DI Andy Horton was created in TIDE OF DEATH and published in 2006 and the rest as they say is history.

But somewhere within me must have lurked that historical itch and so after nineteen contemporary crime novels I decided to scratch it. Hence Inspector Alun Ryga in DEATH IN THE COVE.

I choose the starting point for the novels as 1950 because it is a fascinating time. An era caught between the aftermath of the war and the beginning of the cultural and social revolution of the ‘swinging sixties’. Memories of the war are very strong, and the fear of more world conflicts haunt people. The Korean War is in progress and National Service has been extended. All around is the legacy of the war with bombsites and rubble, bombed out buildings and houses, abandoned military bases in the country and overgrown pillboxes and batteries littering the coast.

With the housing shortages caused by the bombing many are living in privately rented, dinghy, cramped bedsits and poor quality houses with little privacy, comfort and warmth. Or in prefabs, railway carriages, houseboats, or huts. The housing boom and erection of new towns and cities has yet to materialise.

Rationing of some goods is still in operation. There are severe shortages of many consumer products, ‘make-do-and-mend’ carries on as does the black market.

And there are many fractured lives – widows and widowers, mothers and fathers who have lost sons and daughters, people maimed and scarred both physically and emotionally. Others, who after experiencing the adrenaline rush of combat and a varied and exciting life, are finding it hard to adjust, some seeking ways to cope through alcohol, crime, and substance abuse.

Many women who worked in the war are now back at home, some pleased to be, others very much less so. They’re not expected to have careers, but have jobs to tide them over before they marry and have children.

After the war came the nationalisation of the coal mines, the railways, the Bank of England and the iron and steel industry. The creation of the free National Health Service has improved the quality of medical care, especially for the elderly, women and the poor.

Policing in the 1950s was also vastly different, no mobile phones, no dashing about in fast cars and no computers so it was extremely interesting to research and write from both the social and the police point of view.

The 1950s then is an interesting and fascinating era to set down my new detective, Inspector Alun Ryga.

Do you have memories of the 1950s?

Available in paperback, as ebooks, on Amazon Kindle and the first two also  as an audio books narrated by Jonathan Rhodes and published by B7 Media.