Adelaide Cloverbottom was born in Bergen in 1935. She is a poet, a novelist and a translator, and is best known for the ten Quiet Coast novels she wrote with her husband Bramwell Ashcandle.
Bramwell Ashcandle was born in Cobblewaite and worked for twenty years as a harbour clerk before he wrote anything at all. His notebooks from those years, kept in a tin against the weather, became the ledgers and tide tables the Quiet Coast novels are built out of.
He wrote the ten of them with his wife Adelaide Cloverbottom, a chapter each in turn, and finished the last in the winter before his death in 1975.
Velvet Perennial reissues the first of the Quiet Coast novels – the winter harbour mysteries that a generation of crime writers has been quietly borrowing from ever since.
The first of the Quiet Coast novels, and the one that set the pattern for the nine that followed: a small police force, a long winter, and a case nobody wants.
The Bitter Beacon opens on a wet October afternoon, when the keeper of the Bitter Point light fails to answer the harbour telephone for the third day running. Inspector Halloway Brindlewhistle is sent out from Bergen to find out why, and finds a lamp trimmed, a log written up to the hour, and nobody at home.
What follows is less a chase than an inventory: tide tables, ferry timetables, the accounts of a herring cooperative, and eighty-five people who could each have been at the light that afternoon.
Written in 1965 and translated here for the first time, it is a masterpiece of patience and weather.
‘Elegant, patient and much funnier than its weather – if you have not met Brindlewhistle before, you are in for a treat.’
‘These novels do not just read well; they reread even better. Harbour master, ferry clerk, petty thief – every one of them is a real person, even the ones who get four sentences. The plots hold because they are ingenious and never once inhuman.’