☰DECEMBER 2025

Homecoming

At the beginning of December, Newcastle's Community Foundation hosted a Homecoming evening, a celebration of place, but also of the people who'd grown up in the northeast, who were proud to come from here even after they'd moved away and who championed the region. It was an optimistic evening. There seems to be a growing sense that a place once famous for its heavy industry, for mining and shipbuilding, is finding a new role in developing the creative industries. In the audience there were musicians, actors, directors and writers, broadcasters and people working in the voluntary sector to encourage young artists.

I grew up in North Devon, as far away from the northeast as it's possible to be in England. We moved here in the mid-eighties, when my husband started work as conservation officer for the RSPB's regional office in Newcastle. I fell in love with the region immediately. We bought a home in a village in southeast Northumberland, and on the day we moved our neighbour came in to welcome us with tea and gossip. Within an hour, I'd heard the stories behind every family living in the street.

In those early years, we explored the county every weekend with our two young children, visiting the glorious beaches, the uplands and the castles. We made friends and knew that this was where we wanted to make our home.

I'd already published my first two books when we moved north, but the region provided a new inspiration. It seemed to me that the former pit village where we lived provided a more authentic setting for a traditional detective story than a pretty place in the Cotswolds which would be full of incomers and second homers. In our village, curtains did still twitch as elderly women peered out. It would have been fertile ground for Miss Marple. I began the Inspector Ramsay books.

Vera Stanhope came a little later in the nineties. I was having no commercial success and a new editor suggested that I try something different - a longer stand-alone novel of psychological suspense. In the end, the book was still a police procedural - Vera forced herself into the story - and The Crow Trap turned out to be the first of a series.

The TV adaptation came about because Elaine Collins, who was books executive for ITV, wandered into an Oxfam shop in North London looking for novels to take on holiday. That serendipitous purchase turned into a popular television show, produced by Elaine, which went on to sell to nearly 200 overseas territories. I had very little influence on the television - the production team knew far more about a making good show than I did - but I did insist that the show was filmed where the books were set. I couldn't imagine Vera growing out of anywhere but the Northumberland hills. And after all this time, I can't imagine anyone other than Brenda Blethyn playing my character. There were fourteen series before Vera hung up her hat and her mac. I'm now writing the final Vera novel, though it won't be published until 2027.

I felt a bit of an imposter at the Homecoming event. It was full of Geordie accents, and although my grandchildren were born here and speak like all their friends, I'll never manage that. Then Brenda Blethyn got onto the stage. I thought she was there to talk about what the region meant to her, but it seemed that she'd travelled all the way from London to present me with a Homecoming Award. When I joined her, I was almost speechless. She's such a great friend.

At that moment, I did know, like many others who move into the area, that this is my home. I belong here by choice not by birth. It's a wonderful place to be.