Talking Location With … author Alice Castle – THE KENT COAST

24th April 2024

#Talkinglocationwith ... Alice Castle, author of Murder at an English Pub, set on the KENT COAST.

I’ve always loved the Kent coast. Its wide horizons and gentle beaches were the first seaside resorts I ever visited, so for me this is the real sea. My grandparents took us on bucket-and-spade holidays to Ramsgate and Margate when I was tiny, and it was here that my younger brother got his initial glimpse of the sea and named it famously (in our family, anyway), the ‘big tea bath’ – which is what we call the English Channel to this day.

About a second after I settled on a seaside theme for my new series of cozy crime stories, I decided exactly where to go for inspiration. Not far from Ramsgate is a little trio of coastal resorts, Whitstable, Herne Bay and Westgate-on-Sea, which have perfect quirky charm. Whitstable is full of chichi shops and oyster bars, Herne Bay has a beautiful pleasure garden facing the sea, and Westgate has not one but two gorgeous sandy beaches. I got to know them better than ever just before the pandemic, when a French friend bought a flat down there. She was proudly showing it off to her family, saying she could wave to France from her window, when it was pointed out that she was in fact facing Denmark and Norway, not Calais as she had thought. That little detail hasn’t mattered a jot; she still loves the area, and it’s somewhere that’s captured my heart, too.

Beach Huts – Herne Bay

In my books, an amalgam of these Kent coastal towns, and maybe a few more like them, has become Merstairs, the place my amateur sleuth, former London doctor Sarah Vane retires to. Merstairs has everything a seaside town needs. It has an esplanade with wonderful fish and chips shops, plenty of cafes selling delicious cakes, and the local pub, the Jolly Roger, is lavishly decorated with seaside paraphernalia. Of course, this being a cozy crime series, things are not always what they seem – the pub landlord, for example, may or may not have a few secrets up his sleeve!

Reculver Castle

Sarah has recently been widowed and as her fisherman’s cottage is so small, she needs somewhere to store her late husband’s suits. What better place than a beach hut? Naturally Merstairs has loads of these – as do Herne Bay, Whitstable and Westgate in real life. There is something really iconic about the sight of rows of pastel beach huts fringing the Kent coastline, and you can often buy or lease them for the summer (there are loads of websites online but check out www.beachhuts.com or www.beachhuts4hire.com). Unfortunately for Sarah, her friend’s beach hut contains one optional extra she definitely doesn’t need – a corpse. She has her work cut out solving the crime, and in the process really gets to know Merstairs, its colourful inhabitants, and the surrounding area.

The real Kent coast, I’m glad to say, is a lot less crime infested these days – though it has had its moments in the past. One of the oldest buildings in Herne Bay is the Ship Inn, dating from the late eighteenth century. It and another pub, the Rising Sun in East Street, were the location for a network of ruthless smugglers in the early 1800s, evading the duty on importing alcohol like rum.

Herne Bay, Whitstable and Westgate really started to boom during the early period of railway expansion in the 1830s. Day trippers from London got used to coming over to enjoy getting their toes wet for a few hours, before chugging back to the city. Boarding houses thrived, and Herne Bay’s pier (the second-longest in the country) soon boasted a bandstand, which is still there to this day, to entertain the crowds. Whitstable, meanwhile, was doing a thriving trade in fresh oysters, which you can still find at Wheelers Oyster Bar or the Whitstable Oyster Company.

All this expansion, as well as bringing prosperity to the area, also introduced a raffish and even sometimes sinister element from the cities. The Kent coast became known as a place where well-to-do businessmen would set up their mistresses. It was even the spot where the notorious brides-in-the-bath murderer, George Smith, a bigamist and serial killer, murdered his first victim, Bessie Williams, in the High Street in Herne Bay.

But don’t worry, the Kent coast is safe as houses these days – except between the covers of my books, of course.

Alice Castle

Murder at an English Pub by Alice Castle, Sarah Vane Mystery book one, is available for pre-order now here and will be published by Bookouture on 3^rd July 2024.

Catch the author on TwitterX @AliceMCastle and connect via her website 

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