Today at the British Library an event is running called Deadly: The Festival of Women Writing Crime. The event is described as ‘a celebration of the very best in contemporary crime writing by women. This inaugural festival features non-fiction as well as fiction, with brand-new work from celebrated authors as well as lively exploration of themes and perceptions relating to the genre.’
I thought it would be fun to join in with this celebration by setting you, my readers, some puzzles, all of which are centred on modern female crime writers – naturally. I have posted two other puzzle posts in conjunction with this one, so do check those out. You can find the links below:
Hidden Words: Ann Cleeves and Elly Griffth Edition
I will be doing a roundup post of all the answers in April.
Your next challenge has two stages. Stage one requires you to match each crime writer to the location they primarily set their book in.
List of Locations
- Whitley Bay
- Orkney
- Manchester
- South London
- Peterborough
- St Davids, Wales
- Northumberland National Park
- Oxford
- Cambridge
- Brighton
Decided on your matches? Let’s get started on stage two of the puzzle, which taxes your knowledge of UK geography. Just suppose that I was going to host a party for all these writers (because I am nice like that) and the party is going to take place on Unst, which the internet suggests is the most northerly inhabited British island (I’m nice, but not above being terribly inconvenient to my guests). All ten crime writers are going to drive (and take the ferry) to this party and their starting destination will be the location of their novel (bet you never saw that coming!). Your task is to list the crime authors, starting with the author who would arrive at Unst first, and ending with the writer who would arrive last. Instead of using length of journey time (as Google maps changes its answer depending on what time of day it is), please use the number of miles to inform your answers. So, the first person to arrive would be the person who has the fewest miles to cover, the last person to arrive would have the most miles to cover.
Good luck! Hopefully you might find a great new book to try too!
