Why the Solway Firth is a criminally good place for a murder

Kippford, the inspiration for fictional village Kirkness

When Lynne McEwan was looking for a locale for a new detective series, she settled on the Solway Firth and through the adventures of DI Shona Oliver, discovered it is the perfect spot for a crime spree.

In the Scottish literary landscape, you’re never more than a short distance from fictional detective. Lob that smoking gun in a burn, stash a blood-stained dagger in a loch and your crime will surely be found out by Rebus, Jimmy Perez, DCI Jack Logan, DI Alex Morrow and a host more. Neither geography nor time – as cold case queens Dr Rona MacLeod and DCI Karen Pirie will remind you, is sufficient to escape justice.

This was the conundrum I faced when I began writing my DI Shona Oliver series. I had my detective but where in this crowded landscape could she go? Following the writer’s maxim that if you can be anywhere in your imagination, go somewhere that fascinates you, I headed to the beautiful but deadly Solway Firth, the perfect setting for a fictional crime spree.

In Dumfries and Galloway, I’d found a crossing place between Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, a place of borders, so appropriate for crime fiction which interrogates the shifting legal and moral lines between good and evil, right and wrong. I’d been a big fan of the Scandi-Noir TV series The Bridge, set between Denmark and Sweden, and here was a chance on home ground to butt different cultural and legal systems up against each other and see what happened.

It was also an opportunity to explore somewhere readers might enjoy visiting, a beautiful coastline with picturesque villages and beaches, backed by a landscape of moors and mountains full of history and drama. But above all it was the treacherous, shifting sea that was so perfect for my DI Shona Oliver – part-time lifeboat volunteer and full-time detective – that drew me in. The Solway had the lot.

The first book in the series, In Dark Water, begins in the fictional Kirkness, based on the real village of Kippford, nicknamed the Solway Riviera. I chose it because it already had everything I needed – a lifeboat station, a lovely hotel and pub, The Anchor, and a yacht club, all of which were the basis for locations in the book. There’s even a tower-like house, the model for High Pines, the boutique B&B that Shona runs with her husband. By opting to make it fictional I can add a festival or a castle, tweaking the locations as the plot demands without getting it too wrong. Dumfries appears as itself, full of great shops and museums. In the firth, Robin Rigg sandbank, through which the real-life border between Scotland and England runs, is where a young woman’s body is washed up, kicking off the hunt for the killer and a partnership between Shona and her Cumbrian counterpart, DC Dan Ridley.

A chance encounter of Kippford beach one night gave me the idea for the second book, Dead Man Deep which features the traditional Solway fishing practice of haaf netting, said to originate in Viking times. It involves walking chest-high into the firth with a structure like a football goal on your shoulders, in which salmon are caught. The fish are rare now, and so is the practice, but a few licenced and hardy individuals keep it alive, and you may be lucky enough to see it in action between May and September, especially around the Annan area.

Practically everyone I’ve spoken to on my research trips has a story where the sea, so benign, so beautiful, has made a victim of a fisherman or an unwary dog walker, providing a tense backdrop of jeopardy for the DI Shona Oliver series. The space between a near miss to recount in the bar afterwards, and a watery eternity is, at times, so thin as to be almost invisible.

Then there are the ghosts and legends that haunt the coast. I’d wanted to explore both smuggling and Scotland’s National Bard, Robert Burns since I began writing the series. In The Gathering Storm, Hollywood comes to the Solway in the shape of a film shoot dramatising Burns’ part in the assault on the smugglers’ brig Rosamund in February 1792 at Sarkfoot. I was also able to use the marshes and dramatic sea arch, The Needle’s Eye, at Sandyhills as a location. Nearby is Piper’s Cave, a natural opening extended by copper miners, said to be haunted by a ghostly piper who walked inside playing his bagpipes and was never seen again. I wasn’t brave enough to explore all the way to the end, but there was definitely the sound of more than the sea inside, and it’s not a place to linger with the tide creeping in.

There are nearly a dozen islands in the Solway, many of which can be walked to at low tide. I repurposed Ardwall, the largest of the Isles of Fleet, as St Catrin’s in Dead Man Deep. Heston, with its ruined manor house built for Edward Balliol, briefly King of Scotland, became Hildan Island in The Gathering Storm, with the house restored. Little Ross has a history of true crime, rather than the fictional variety. In 1960, it was the scene of the infamous murder of a lighthouse keeper, Hugh Clark, discovered by the secretary of Kirkcudbright RNLI and his son, who’d arrived for a picnic. After a nationwide manhunt, the culprit was caught but committed suicide in prison. The lighthouse is still in operation, though the island is in private hands, and there are plans to renovate cottages for holiday accommodation.

The latest in the series, A Troubled Tide, returns to Kippford and the sea for inspiration. It begins with a charity triathlon where the death of a fellow officer leads Shona on an investigation where she must sort friend from foe. The area’s forest and shoreline have, of course, their part to play too.

Literary tourism is a growing and welcome trend, but many authors of the past also found inspiration in the Solway. Richard Hannay, the hero of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps fixed on Galloway as the best place to go, and many have since followed in his footsteps to the world famous Wigtown Book Festival. Dorothy L Sayers’ twisty 1932 crime thriller Five Red Herrings also has locations you can visit, including Kirkcudbright and the Big Water of Fleet viaduct, in the shadow of which the murder of an artist takes place. Robert Burns drew extensively on the landscape and supernatural stories for his work. Walter Scott romanticised the Solway smugglers in novels like Redgauntlet and Guy Mannering, and you can still visit Dirk Hatterick’s Cave named for daring contrabandist in the latter.

The character of Shona Oliver herself is based on a rare-for-the-time female RNLI crew member I met when I amateur raced on a 10m yacht back in the 1980s. There was a question I never got to ask – why would you volunteer, potentially put your own life at risk, to save a stranger, especially when the sea is at its most terrifying? It’s those questions I hope to explore in the series, in addition to solving some cracking crime.

One of the other advantages of visiting the Solway which was confided to me recently is that Dumfries and Galloway has no traffic wardens. Use that information carefully, ideally while visiting it’s beautiful coastline or a local bookshop, and don’t tell anyone I told you.

A Troubled Tide by Lynn McEwan is published by Canelo, priced £9.99 on 27 March