Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

Another late night at Ye Old Cross Inn, the innkeeper's wife turfed out the crowd while he took stock of the ale left within and rattled the necks of bottles of stout.    Together they watched their patrons stagger up the slope from Alnwick's Narrowgate, following lamps with glints thin as daggers to cold doorsteps where angry wives wait.    And as the innkeeper reached for three bottles that sat by the window on a blackening wall,  his wife glanced up, clearing pipes of their dottle and saw him land hard from an unlikely fall.    Clutching his body, the wife felt a chill: those three dirty bottles were frightfully still... This poem was inspired by Ye Olde Cross Inn of Alnwick, Northumberland. The mythic bottles can be found inside.  For more details:  https://www.thedirtybottles.co.uk/about/

This week the Writers’ Lunch grills author Dave Rigby about his latest detective thriller, Shoreline. Harry Vos, your amateur detective is a rounded character with lots of life experience. How did you get to know him? click here for details His name was my starting point. I saw it in a newspaper and thought it was a good mixture of a very English sounding first name and a Flemish / Dutch sounding surname. Because I’ve holidayed in the Flemish area of Belgium quite a bit, I decided to base him there. I thought it would be good to have a man in his sixties as the central character, retired (like me) and not a professional crime investigator. That way I don’t have to learn about police procedural stuff. I can just allow Harry to make it up as he goes along (as I do!). I had a strong idea of his character from the start (unlike the plot which unrolled as things developed). Basically I envisaged a solid man but with a number of strong character traits. He’s dogged, stubborn, gets a...