Historical novel set around ENGLAND (Birmingham)
Talking Location With … Amelia Blackwell: PLYMOUTH and DERBYSHIRE
8th July 2025
#TalkingLocationWith … Amelia Blackwell, author of A Crime Through Time (Miss Darcy Investigates)
How a rainy week of high school work experience inspired a novel.
Pemberley, 1799. When Miss Georgiana Darcy attempts to escape an unwanted marriage proposal, she isn’t expecting to end up quite so far from home. But after encountering a mysterious object in the nearby woods, she finds herself transported almost two hundred years into the future.
Saltram, 1995. At a grand country house where a film crew are busy shooting the latest Jane Austen adaptation, a terrible crime has been committed. And Miss Darcy – newly arrived, impeccably dressed and thoroughly confused – is the only witness.
It soon becomes clear that, somehow, Georgiana was meant to solve this riddle. With the help of a distractingly handsome Irishman named Quinn and a border collie named Watson, she sets out to stop the killer before they can strike again. But meanwhile, trouble is brewing back at Pemberley and time, it seems, is not on her side
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It was pure coincidence that I completed my high school work experience at Saltram House during the spring that Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman & Kate Winslet) was filmed there, and I never imagined in my wildest dreams that those blustery, exhausting days would one day provide the spark for a novel. Back then, I dreamt of a future career as a Dartmoor Ranger and I spent my time at Saltram House shadowing the Warden of the estate and his border collie. However, almost thirty years later when I needed a setting for my cosy crime novel featuring Mr Darcy’s little sister Georgiana Darcy as an amateur sleuth, Saltram felt like the perfect location.
During my research for the novel, I discovered that Jane Austen had a strong personal connection to Saltram House, through her friendship with Frances Talbot, the Countess of Morley, who was then the mistress of Saltram. It is documented that Jane Austen actually gifted the Countess one of her cherished author copies of Emma, and some of their correspondence survives, as do the rumours that John Parker – the 1st Earl of Morley – was the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy!
Perhaps it will come as no surprise to readers of A Crime Through Time that the most memorable part of my work experience came on my very first day at Saltram, when I was required to assist the Warden in the felling of a rotten sycamore tree, which sparked the idea for the opening scene of the book, in which Georgiana Darcy finds a dead body with a chainsaw hanging from the boughs of a sycamore. I hope the Warden with whom I once worked will forgive me for taking such a shocking liberty…
In my writing, it often seems to be the case that place lends itself to plot, as when I see an interesting location, my mind wanders to scenes that I could possibly set there.
There is a famous eighteenth century amphitheatre on the banks of the River Plym that I used to daydream about from the other side of the river during bus rides to the city centre, and I ended up using this landmark as a pivotal scene in the novel – in fact, this amphitheatre sits at the very centre of the story.
On a similar note, shortly after my work experience, I returned to Saltram as a volunteer for the construction of a willow figure sculpture trail in the estate’s beautiful woods and when I needed a setting for the finale of the book, I couldn’t resist placing Georgiana in the woods among these eerie wooden sculptures.
It’s strange to think that if I hadn’t been sent to Saltram House as a shy fourteen-year-old in need of work experience, I’d never have written A Crime Through Time.
AMELIA BLACKWELL
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