On a windy knoll behind a prehistoric walled settlement in beguiling and enigmatic West Penwith, England, an American archeology team makes an unnerving discovery. Beneath a Stone Age burial quoit, at the site of an Iron Age village, a single, skeletal finger sticks up out of the soil.
And so begins the 18th book and first foray into the mystery genre by international novelist and nonfiction writer Will North. Indeed, if you ask North what he’s been doing lately, he’ll answer he’s been busy killing people — from the comfort of his Burton home office overlooking Governor’s Row that is. But before his characters execute any further deleterious deeds, North plans to read “Harm None,” the first book in his new “Davies & West Mystery Series,” at 6 p.m. Friday at the Vashon Bookshop.
At first glance “Harm None” appears to follow in the footsteps of North’s previous fiction. The story is set in Britain — this time in West Penwith at the southwestern tip of Cornwall. His truth-teller protagonist, often a child or elder, is a 10 year-old girl, and like “Summer’s End,” North’s novel released last year, “Harm None” flirts with the paranormal. But that’s where the similarities end.
“Writing a mystery is a much more complicated form than a romantic book or nonfiction,” North said. “There are so many loose ends going on simultaneously, with dead ends and red herrings to lead the reader and police astray.”
Detective Sergeant Morgan Davies, described by North as an irascible, rule-breaking detective, and her gentle colleague Calum West, the head scene-of-crime investigator for Cornwall police, are called to the crime site by Brad Hunter, the American archeology professor in charge of the archeological dig. The finger belongs to the skeleton of a young girl who disappeared the year before, and its discovery points to one main suspect — a local village wise woman with the gift of clairsentience — notwithstanding a cast of suspicious secondary characters who help divert and complicate the investigation.
North admits “Harm None” is a big departure from his earlier books but that he has always read British murder mysteries — from the Golden Age of writers between the wars like Dorothy Sayres, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh to the contemporary writers like P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, Martha Grimes and Washington’s own Elizabeth George.
“But it all started with Sherlock Holmes,” North said. “When I was perhaps 10 years old and trying to make sense of a family full of drama and chaos, I read a sentence from Holmes’ book ‘The Sign of the Four’ that changed my life and taught me how to think: ‘When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’ It’s the principle of deductive reasoning, a foundation of logic, and I use it every day.”
Despite the use of logic, North, a self-professed Anglophile, finds Cornwall to be a magical place, where the paranormal is normal and the landscape is littered with Iron, Stone and Bronze Age antiquities and monuments. He spent a lot of time there a decade ago and discovered that the area’s tradition of the wise women — otherwise known as witches — never died out. And that sparked the idea for North’s book: What if a murder took place in desolate West Penwith, the end of nowhere, in which the wise woman became the prime suspect?
“I like the reasoning and twisting puzzle of a mystery,” North said. “But I don’t read to solve the puzzle. I read mysteries to be carried along. ‘Harm None’ has my signature rich sense of setting and place, landscape, archeology and anthropology, so I think the reader will feel like they are there. I hope it will carry them along.”
