In Stella Cameron’s latest, Folly (out on May 1, 2015), Alex Duggins returns to her quaint town in the Cotswolds to recover, and start over, after her marriage collapses. When Alex discovers a dead body, she winds up being pulled into a local mystery that threatens to unearth dark secrets about the town, as well as her own past.
We talked to Cameron—who grew up in Dorset, England, and now lives in the Seattle area—about how she chooses her settings, why she feels she understands England better after decades as an American, and what her fascination is with the Cotswolds.
“English villages to me are just the perfect settings,” Cameron said, explaining why she chose to set Folly, the first in a planned series featuring the Alex Duggins character, in one. “In theory everyone knows everyone else,” making the place the “perfect breeding ground” for a murder. In these quaint, quiet villages, Cameron noted, the last thing you expect to see is a dead body.
Cameron, who has been in the States for over 30 years now, said she thinks she sees her home country with a “sharpness” that she didn’t when she lived there. And this is something she's bringing to the new series.
“I see England with a clear eye; an eye that both knows it, and has a gentle feeling for it,” she said. “I’m the perfect person to write these books,” she joked, “because I’m bilingual in English.”
As it happens, Cameron has been wanting to return to England—at least in her fiction—for some time now. It has not been easy, though, with her time focused on her long-running, and bestselling, Bayou Books series, set in New Orleans.
“I started thinking about this series, in the Cotswolds, about ten years ago,” she said, noting that she couldn’t get to it because she was contracted to do other books.
Now that she’s written the first Alex Duggins mystery, though, she thinks she’ll be staying with the character, and the Cotswolds, for some time.
Cameron goes back to the Cotswolds (which are in the south central part of the country) at least once a year, and does research. What does that entail? It could be anything from chatting up the local police force—which she often does—to simply sitting in the pub and “listening to people talk.” The author pays attention to the big things, as well as the details, such as what brands people are using.
Not only is the new Alex Duggins series a departure in terms of setting for Cameron, it’s also a slight departure in genre. Best known for writing romantic suspense—the Duggins books are straight-up mysteries—Cameron said she made the switch after years of toying with the idea. “I always wanted to take the leap and just go purely for mystery.” And, she feels, writing romantic suspense novels has “set her up” for writing mysteries, having made her particularly well-attuned to writing characters and relationships.
Cameron is known for keeping to one place in her work—in addition to the Bayou Books, she has another long-running series set in Tucson. Nonetheless, she doesn't seem to worry about getting sick of her settings. "It's the strangest thing, really, but I've never gotten sick of a location." To that end, she is not worried about tiring of the Cotswolds. Just the opposite, in fact. "I could write a good number of [Alex Duggins] books."
