A trickle of water, a few stubs of granite, thick green moss muffling everything. I must have walked past the tin mine a dozen times, but I had never seen it. It was easy to miss: just a hollow in the bank of a Dartmoor stream, a deeper shadow among the new bracken and the fading bluebells. The entrance was fringed with ferns, but when I pushed them aside, I could see the tunnel reaching away into the darkness.
Before I moved to Dartmoor, I was an investigative journalist, working for the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Sunday Times. My job took me all over the world. My first four novels were set in this blur of countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Jordan, Russia… The list went on and on.
After I moved to Dartmoor, I wasn’t sure at first if I would be able to keep writing the Casey Benedict stories, with my investigative journalist heroine roaming around the world. Luckily, there was no problem with that.
But at the same time, the wilds of Dartmoor started to inspire me too. Dartmoor, with her storm-blasted skies, her sweeping moors, her treacherous bogs, and her tors jutting like broken teeth on the horizon.
I used to wander out to an abandoned tin miners’ village, long collapsed, just a jumble of granite marking out its forgotten history. Or up to the stone circle at Scorhill, another cryptic monument to Dartmoor’s past.
Slowly, the idea for The Last Truths We Told began to take shape. My first standalone, The Last Truths tells the story of nine university students who sat down to dinner twenty years ago and wrote down predictions for where they’d all be in two decades time. Now they are gathering for a weekend in an ancient Dartmoor house, to find out what they got right and what they got wrong. But a few months ago, one of the nine died in suspicious circumstances…
The book was also inspired by a university reunion, so the book takes inspiration from both my past and my Dartmoor present.
Dartmoor wasn’t my only inspiration for The Last Truths. Wintercross – the ancient manor house in which the remaining eight gather for the weekend – takes inspiration from several historical houses across the country. I have always been intrigued by houses built around secrets: priest holes, secret passages, false walls and so while researching The Last Truths, I visited Harvington Hall, Baddesley Clinton and Coughton Court in Warwickshire, as well as Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. These spectacular old houses all hold hidden secrets - Harvington Hall alone has seven different hides. Those are only the ones we know about, of course. I was particularly interested in the idea that the secrets of priest holes and other hiding places could be lost from one generation to the next.
Like the almost-forgotten Dartmoor mines, these houses hold secrets that can not be easily guessed at. My characters, too, have their own secrets, and their own unguessable stories.
