A Desk Facing the Rain

Ellen Hartley writes about murder for a living, which makes her remarkably good company. We meet on a wet Tuesday in a café above a bookshop in a Yorkshire market town, where she orders tea, refuses cake on the grounds that her detective wouldn't, and then eats half of mine. Her eighth novel is due in spring, and she is at the stage she describes as "the bit where everything I've written looks like scaffolding".

She has lived in the same valley for nineteen years. Before that she was a journalist, then a court reporter, then a probation officer — a career path that reads like a route map to crime fiction. "I never planned it," she says. "I just kept ending up in rooms where people told me the truth about themselves."

Plotting: Order Out of Fog

Ask her how she plots and she laughs. "Badly, at first." Her method is stubbornly physical: a wall, a roll of lining paper, and a set of coloured sticky notes that would embarrass a stationery shop.

• One sheet per timeline. "The present-day investigation goes on white, the flashbacks on blue. If a reader is confused about when they are, that's my fault, not theirs."
• A map on the wall. Printed from an old walking map of the valley, marked with pins for every location she uses. She checks walking distances against it constantly.
• The "why not the police" note. A single card that has to be answered before chapter three: why does her detective get involved at all?
• A list of what each suspect wants. Not what they are hiding — what they want. "Hiding is passive. Wanting drives a scene."

She writes a one-page synopsis, then largely ignores it. "The synopsis is for my editor and for my own nerve. If a character does something better than my plan, I let them."

Research: Libraries, Footpaths and Awkward Telephone Calls

Hartley is meticulous about the small things, because that is where readers catch you out. She keeps a running file of notes, and her research habits are refreshingly unglamorous.

• Read the local paper. Not for plots, but for texture — the price of a pint at a wake, the way a parish council meeting is described.
• Walk the ground. "You can't write a chase across a moor if you've only seen a photograph. Your character will run out of breath in the wrong place."
• Ask the person, not the job title. A retired pathologist once corrected an entire chapter over the phone, patiently, twice.
• Keep a smell file. Wet wool, chip fat, hospital hand gel. Small sensory anchors do more for authenticity than a page of procedure.

She is firm on the limits, too. "I don't bend police procedure just to make a plot work. If the real answer is dull, my job is to make the dull answer dramatic."

Why the British Landscape Suits a Murder

This is where she becomes properly animated. "There's a particular quality of light in this country. Four o'clock in November, a village green, nobody about. Nothing has happened yet and you're already uneasy."

The British landscape, she argues, supplies three things a crime novel needs.

• Enclosure. Hedgerows, drystone walls, lanes that stop at a gate. Isolation without wilderness.
• History under the surface. Barns, boundary stones, old rights of way. Every field has a previous use, and plenty of them were grim.
• A reliable witness problem. Rain, fog, dark afternoons — the weather does plot work for free.

She also points out something subtler: the British countryside is not empty. It is worked. "Farms, footpaths, a post van at half past ten. That means someone always might have seen something, and that's far more interesting than nobody at all."

Where Crime Writers Read

Given the theme, I ask about cosy reading spaces — a phrase she happily defends. "Cosy doesn't mean gentle. It means safe enough to feel afraid in."

Her own reading corner is deliberately modest.

• A chair with arms and a decent lamp. Light over the shoulder, not over the page.
• No screens within reach. Phone in another room, on silent.
• A blanket, a mug, and one book at a time. "If I'm reading three books, I'm not reading any of them."
• A notebook within arm's reach for the moment a solution arrives uninvited.

She reads crime for pleasure but keeps a stack of other things beside it — nature writing, local history, a little poetry. "Writers who read only their own genre start to sound like each other."

A Fair Wind and a Good Alibi

Before we part, I ask what she would tell someone starting out. She thinks for a moment. "Write the first draft as if nobody will read it, because nobody will. Then rewrite it as though your reader is cleverer than you and slightly impatient."

Her other advice is practical: read your dialogue aloud, cut your first chapter politely, and finish the whole book before deciding whether it is any good.

We leave as the rain eases. The valley below the town is grey, green and entirely ordinary, and for a moment I understand exactly why she would choose to set a murder in it.