A dark thriller set mainly in GLASGOW
Talking Location With … Beverley Jones, PACIFIC NORTHWEST
30th June 2021
#TalkingLocationWith… Beverley Jones, author of THE BEACH HOUSE set on the coast in the PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Beverley Jones talks about her novel The Beach House and how a beloved childhood movie provided sinister inspiration on a windswept Oregon shore.
‘The body isn’t the first thing I see when I step into the kitchen, it’s the knife, the rope and the handcuffs…’
This is certainly not the welcome Grace Jensen expects when she returns to her smart beachfront home in Lookout Beach, a tiny community nestled on the shores of the Pacific Northwest. Everyone in the town assumes Grace has had a visit from a would-be sex attacker, that a ‘home invasion’ has been interrupted. But Grace suspects otherwise, because she knows she left her early life in another small seaside village, in South Wales, for a very good reason. Maybe that reason has finally caught up with her.
This scenario, which became the opening lines of my newest novel, had been percolating around my head for years, the image of a well-to-do young woman returning home, setting down her shopping bag on the kitchen worktop, only to realise all is definitely not how it should be, and she might not be alone in the house. But it took a trip to the rugged and largely un-touristy Oregon coast (well, unvisited by most Brits anyway) for the scene to shape itself into the opening lines of The Beach House and the psychological thriller that followed.
So, how did I end up in the Pacific Northwest, specifically the resort of Cannon Beach via Seattle, Washington and the 
city of Portland? It was a journey that began around 1985, with a childhood trip to the cinema to see a film about pirates and buried treasure, villainous escaped convicts and a deformed but good-hearted anti-hero called Sloth, who was as terrifying as he was heroic.
That movie was Steven Spielberg’s The Goonies, set in Astoria, northern Oregon, and, over the years, the VHS copy later recorded from the TV, was played endlessly on wet Sunday afternoons, transporting me to a place where a geeky, asthmatic kid called Mikey (who I definitely identified with) saves his family home on the ‘Goon docks’ by using his brain and plucky determination.
Before COVID grounded us all, my husband and I had already been lucky enough to fulfil several of my childhood wishes for American escapism by touring some the USA’s breath-taking national parks, including the red sand monoliths of Monument Valley in Utah and the otherworldly granite valleys and giant forests of Yosemite Valley in California. Those vast, wild spaces became the setting for my sixth novel Wilderness (The Perfect Break), now optioned for TV by Firebird Pictures, featuring an unhappy couple’s road trip through the American West that turns deadly, (perhaps you can see a pattern of inspiration forming here?).
Getting mugshots like the Fratellis at the Oregon Film Museum. The Fratellis’ getaway car from the movie.
In 2018, I suggested we stray a bit further off the beaten track to Astoria, to make like Mikey and the gang. So, a year later, we were flying across the vast silvery mouth of the mighty Columbia river, on the Astoria- Megler Bridge, almost four miles in length and the longest continuous steel truss bridge in north America. Soon we were playing eight-year olds again, exploring the dinky Oregon Film Museum in the former county jail, where the villainous Fratelli brothers made their escape in the movie, getting our mugshots done, then taking selfies in front of the famous sea stacks at Cannon Beach down the coast, in search of One-Eyed Willy the pirate and his treasure.
But Goonies nostalgia soon morphed into something else, as we drove through the wild and Oregon landscape. There was something hard-fought and hard-won about the communities clinging to that coast, a beautiful yet brutal forested landscape that dips down to the boiling Pacific, the very edge of the West, before you meet nothing but ocean all the way to Japan. As my protagonist Grace observes, there’s something about that serrated tree and cliff-twisted landscape that has teeth, ready to be bared at the unsuspecting traveller – almost seething with suggested secrets and undiscovered stories.
As we continued our journey, punctuated with giant seafood platters, vats of coffee and creatively coloured donuts, we learned about the first western ‘settlers’ of the region, the early pioneers like Lewis and Clarke, literally hacking their way along the Oregon trail through starvation and dysentery for years. They spent a winter at the marvellously, miserably-named ‘Dismal Nitch’ on the banks of the Columbia, south of Astoria, searching for the western expanse of the Pacific Ocean. They were in search of new territories, fresh starts, and wealth, pushing aside the peoples with not such loud voices, who’d been minding their own business for millennia. Then we passed the 21st Century legacy of their exploration, the totem poles that line the route along the coast, silent, watching, the white clapboard enclaves of the wealthy, and the rusted fishing and logging towns industry is fast deserting. Soon a story took hold, because it struck me that the Oregon coast was exactly the sort of place people might end up if they were trying to hide or reinvent themselves.
Like Grace, an up-and-coming architect, building, of course, a beach house that she calls her ‘clean slate’ and fresh start. But then she comes home one day to discover that unexpected visitor has left her those strange gifts – a knife, a rope bound in a familiar red ribbon and a pair of handcuffs.
Grace has tried so hard to reinvent herself as the good wife and good mother she wants to believe she is, far from her 
childhood on the South Wales Coast, she’s almost forgotten who she hurt back there. But she soon learns that you carry your past with you wherever you go. The stories of your home town, and who you once were, cling on through the years. Their power endures for those who have been wronged and maybe have their own version of how the story actually ends. As Grace, is about to find out…
The Beach House in released in e-book on June 24th, 2021, by Little Brown, and in paperback later in 2021.
Beverley Jones
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