When, several years ago, I was asked to write and present a Halloween ghost-story evening at a local historic house, there were so many legends attached to the place it was almost a question of auditioning the resident spooks to decide which to use. (‘No, sorry, we can’t have a headless horseman because of Health & Safety…’ ‘Chain rattling is fine, providing you keep the noise down…’)
Tales ranged from spectral footsteps to an old lady in a rocking chair. In the psychedelic 1960s a séance was held there, but the findings were ambiguous. (The report of a Royalist soldier seen during the séance was never considered reliable, particularly since he apparently winked at one of the female ghost-hunters.)
I took two or three of these tales, stirred in a couple of my own, and presented the result as a series of diaries ‘found’ during renovations of the house. My brother, suitably concealed behind a curtained arras like a villain in a melodrama, provided spooky music from a portable CD-player.
It was well received. In fact there were requests to repeat the performance all over the place. A marvellous Victorian theatre redolent of gaslight and Henry Irving… A delightful old bookshop, where Pepys might have browsed... And it was interesting and fun to research ghost tales within the different places, and adapt the original setting to the locality. Because is there a town or village in the UK that doesn’t have its own ghost legend?
Then, in 2010, Severn House approached me with the tempting suggestion that I write a supernatural mystery for them. So I disinterred the diaries, and this time created a house on the Shropshire borders with a dark reputation and, at the core of the darkness, an ancient legend. For the modern-day frame, conscious of treading in the steps of the incomparable M.R. James, but hoping to print new footsteps of my own, I created an Oxford don as reluctant hero.
And Property of a Lady was born.

Published by Severn House in 2011

A house with a sinister past… and a grisly power.

When Michael Flint is asked by American friends to look over an old Shropshire house they have unexpectedly inherited, he is reluctant to leave the quiet of his Oxford study.

But when he sees Charect House, its uncanny echoes from the past fascinate him – even though it has such a sinister reputation no one has lived in it for almost a century.

It’s not until Michael meets the young widow, Nell West, that the menace within the house wakes. Is Nell’s small daughter the catalyst that causes the Dead Man’s Knock to be heard again and calls up the nightmare figure bearing a flickering light with a grisly power? The figure with black pits where his eyes should be, who seems to threaten not only Nell’s daughter, but also Michael’s goddaughter, thousands of miles away?

Old diaries, found during the renovations, provide Michael and Nell with glimpses of a darkness that once engulfed Charect House and its occupants. But can the truth be uncovered before it causes new tragedy?

Download the first chapter of Property of a Lady here, courtesy of www.severnhouse.com  

Publication March 2012

The second of the Nell West/Michael Flint series

When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather’s North London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house, as a frightened eight-year-old, that the strange glimpses into his great-grandfather’s life began. Glimpses that resembled faded ciné footage or an old, scratched recording, and that have gradually revealed sinister darknesses in his family’s past.
Through those darknesses runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set – thirty-two carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades.

Michael Flint, meeting Benedict in Oxford, starts to research some of the strange shutter-flash images, and chilling facts begin to emerge – facts that suggest the legend contained a disturbing reality.

And when Nell West – no stranger to the eeriness in old properties – begins to compile an inventory of Holly Lodge’s contents for her antique business, it seems that the chess set’s malevolence might be reaching out to the present.

From the reference books: The term sin eater refers to a person who, by means of food and drink, would ritualistically take on the sins of a dead or dying person, thus absolving his or her soul. Parts of the Old Testament hint at the ritual of sin-eating, and over the centuries it seems to have been performed, in various forms, in many parts of the world. The last recorded instance of a sin-eater in the UK was in Shropshire as recently as 1893.