Historical crime mystery set in BRISTOL and LONDON
Talking Location With … Bernadette Bernson: WHITBY
22nd October 2026
#TalkingLocationWith …. Bernadette Bernson, author of The Whitby Protocol: WHITBY
Whitby: Beauty, Secrets and the Making of a Thriller
Some places stay with you long after you have left. For me, Whitby became one of those places — and eventually the setting for a story about the things we remember, the things we forget, and the people who might prefer us never to discover the difference.
A visit to this North Yorkshire coastal town inspired my novel, The Whitby Protocol. Its narrow streets, the 199 Steps and the ruined abbey overlooking the sea offered more than a backdrop. They helped me find the atmosphere of the book: beautiful, absorbing and quietly unsettling.
There is an intriguing contrast at the heart of Whitby. It is a place people visit for pleasure, yet its landscape lends itself so readily to darker imaginings. A street that invites exploration can also conceal someone from view. The sea offers a sense of freedom, but it can make the land feel like an edge. Above it all, the abbey stands open to the sky, a reminder that even imposing structures can become fragments. For a thriller writer, those contrasts are irresistible.
I did not want simply to place a crime in a picturesque town. I wanted the setting to influence how the story felt, how its characters moved through it, and what readers might expect to find around the next corner. Whitby gave me a landscape in which ordinary life and imagined danger could exist very close together.
My protagonist, Detective Constable Martha Rowe, arrives there after a failed undercover operation in Sheffield. At twenty-eight, she hopes that a transfer to North Yorkshire will offer the possibility of a fresh start. Instead, she encounters redacted files, missing research subjects and an unidentified young woman found dead on the moors. As she investigates, the questions become increasingly personal: can she trust her own memories?
Bodsa via Pixabay
That uncertainty became an important link between character and place. Martha has to look again at things she thought she understood. I wanted readers to experience something similar with the landscape: to recognise its beauty while wondering what might lie beyond the familiar view.
The 199 Steps and the abbey belong to the Whitby many visitors know. In the novel, however, the town is also somewhere people work, carry private worries and attempt to make sense of what is happening around them. Martha’s Whitby needed to feel inhabited. A place can be extraordinary to a visitor and still be someone else’s everyday world.
Beyond the town, the North York Moors offered a different kind of tension. Where narrow streets limit what you can see, open country seems to promise visibility. Yet distance creates its own uncertainty. There may be space in every direction without anyone close enough to help.
That apparent contradiction suited the novel perfectly. Openness does not necessarily mean safety, just as a familiar place does not necessarily mean understanding. The moors allow the story to breathe, but they also make its characters feel exposed.
Goathland and Robin Hood’s Bay extend that geographical world. I wanted the novel to move beyond a single recognisable image of Whitby and into the surrounding landscape. The relationship between town, coast and moor gives the investigation a sense of movement, while keeping it rooted in a particular part of England.
These places also offer room for something other than fear. A thriller needs changes of pace: moments in which a character can pause, notice what is around her, or experience a little tenderness. Beauty matters because the people in danger have something worth returning to. Without those quieter moments, the darkness would have less meaning.
As a Germany-based author, translator and editor, I wrote The Whitby Protocol in British English before translating it into German. England has long held a fascination for me, but this story grew from a particular encounter with a particular place. Whitby helped turn that fascination into a fictional world.
The conspiracy in the novel is invented. The invitation to explore the landscape is real. I hope readers who know Whitby will enjoy recognising something of it, and that those who have never been might feel curious enough to visit. They will find a beautiful coastal town. Martha Rowe, unfortunately, has rather more to contend with.
For me, that is one of the pleasures of fiction rooted in place: a landscape can welcome us, inspire us and unsettle us, sometimes within the same page.
Bernadette Bernson
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
