Crime writer DAVID MARK on the grisly real life murder that inspired his new novel, VALE OF TEARS
You don’t stumble onto Belmount Farm by accident. It crouches high up on the Weardale moors, a sagging, roofless skeleton: grey stone sinking into the mud and the heather, the sheep-dung; a garnish of sun-bleached animal bones.
It’s a crime scene frozen in time, haunted by the events of New Year’s Day 1880, when 26-year-old tenant farmer Robert Snowball was found in the loft with his skull crushed by a three-pound sledgehammer—a brutal mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
For a few years, this hollow-eyed mausoleum was just about visible from my bedroom window. I lived in the odd little Northumberland hamlet of Blanchland and used to regularly make my way up past the old mining gear and onto the windswept hills, trudging over the honeycombed earth to go and spend a pleasantly bleak half hour sitting in the shelter of the old, abandoned house, thinking writerly, morbid thoughts. I’d usually be accompanied by my littlest daughter, who could be relied upon to ask searching questions like “do you think there’s still a bit of skull somewhere” and ‘if I find one of his teeth can I keep it?”
The story of Robert Snowball’s murder is very much the inspiration for the third Sal Delaney novel, Vale of Tears. When a group of teenagers are drawn to a tumbledown ruin known locally as The Murder House, they find a fresh corpse in one of the cow byres. Their resulting flight from the scene of the crime causes a road traffic accident that brings collision investigator Sal Delaney back to the moors where she spent a wild, half-feral childhood. It’s the start of an investigation that threatens all that she holds dear, and which has her chasing a killer with a malevolent fascination for the unsolved case.
I’ve braced myself for the fact that some of the local historians will be utterly incensed at the liberties I’ve taken with their own pet theories about who did what and why, but I take comfort in the fact they’ll have to actually buy and read the book in order to be cross.
I’ve done what all fiction writers do – taken something real, planted it in earth and blood and fertiliser, and made a rather fetching bonsai out of whatever grows. If you need a mental picture, how about this: myself and my daughter, cross-legged in front of Snowball’s grave in the churchyard at Blanchland, apologising in advance for using his death as the wet clay for me to carve a story into. My daughter puts it best “Sorry you’re dead, but Daddy’s going to write a really good book about it…,”
Don’t go into the water – a word of warning from DAVID MARK as he looks to scare the life out of wild swimmers everywhere.
I was about six years old, I think. Dad was on the sofa, excitedly conducting the menacing orchestra music that was oozing from the TV. Mam was behind her magazine, shuddering in advance. I was on the floor trying not to be noticed, watching through latticed fingers as a great white shark nosed its way through the dark waters off Amity Island. This was clearly not a movie to miss – not least because it seemed to be about a shark who could play the cello.
Jaws, and Malcolm Mark, certainly have a lot to answer for. His contention that I would be fine lasted until about halfway through the movie. I can still visualise the white-faced, red-necked head bobbing into shot on the submerged boat – a scene that stayed with me every time I closed my eyes, and which put the serious kibosh on swimming lessons.
Fast forward forty-plus years and my fear of open water continues undiminished. I can bring myself to paddle, but the thought of going into open water? The idea of not being able to feel what was nudging around my ankles, nibbling at my knee-pits, squirming wetly underfoot or taking me around the waist with strong, powerful jaws … no thanks, you freaks.
If you’re one of those people who take great joy in wild swimming, I salute you. I also think you’re insane. The Drowned Girl is my attempt to exorcise my demons, or at the very least, persuade some of you not to go in above the shin.
It’s a story that has taken me years to work out of my system – not least because every time I sat down t write it, I scared myself silly. It’s a crime book, but not as we know it.
A woman vanishes from a remote lake in Cumbria. All that’s left behind are her abandoned clothes, a ringing phone, and a stretch of dark water that won’t give her back. Enter Moses Crown, foundling, black sheep and a dangerously conflicted anti-hero. He knows these waters and the cave network beneath. And he soon finds himself on the trail of whatever it is that lurks in the depths, and rises to feed.
It’s a novel that takes me back to the Lake District I spent so long exploring in my childhood, and which I have once again thoroughly spoiled for myself by dropping bodies all across the topography. The things I do for you …
