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could have been standing on the self-same spot a thousand years ago, hearing the same sounds, looking out over the same sea. And then I opened my eyes and, looking south, saw the silent and stark outline of Sizewell nuclear power station dominating the coastline. I thought of all the lives that have been lived on this shore, of the windmills, once providers of power, now prosperous homes, of the ruined abbeys at Leiston and South Cove which seemed like monuments to a decaying faith, of the detritus of my generation, the great lumps of concrete half embedded in the shingle, and the concrete pillboxes, partof the defences against the expected German invasion on this coast. And immediately I knew with an almost physical surge of excitement that I had a novel. The next book would be set on a lonely stretch of East Anglian coast under the shadow of a nuclear power station. The book, at present no more than a nebulous idea born of a moment in time and a specific place, might take more than a year to research and plan and the writing even longer, but already it has life.
    The Southwold house which I bought in July 1995 enclosed me as I entered it with a sense of welcoming peace. Brian Duncan, the builder, has removed the cumbersome and difficult-to-operate gas fire in the sitting-room and opened the fireplace. It now looks much as it must have done when the house was built in the seventeenth century. He managed to find old bricks to line it and an oak beam for the lintel, which matches the beams in the ceiling.
    The lecture this evening was appropriately on the use of place in fiction, a title which seemed to me to relate only remotely to the concerns of the Society although this, they had told me, was not a problem. The atmosphere of indulgent holiday expectancy was helped by the constant sound of the sea splurging against the pier. I illustrated the talk with examples of the way setting is used in fiction: to create mood and atmosphere; as an aid to characterization; to root the action in the firm soil of a recognized place, thus aiding credibility, and to provide that contrast which, in crime fiction, can enhance horror as well as providing a relief from it. Setting can also have a symbolic importance, as does the black tower in my novel of that name and the nuclear power station in
Devices and Desires
.
    The talk was followed by twenty minutes of questions and discussion. One question which I can be sure of getting, and did so this evening, is: Why are women writers pre-eminent in the field of crime fiction? I reply that if we are surveying the whole field of crime writing, then it’s hardly accurate to say that we are. Even if we consider only the detective story, I think it is still arguable that the sexes may be more equal than is sometimes alleged. Even so, many people, asked to name writers of detective fiction, would begin with Agatha Christie and probably go on to Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and, today, Ruth Rendell and a score of other well-known women crime writers here and in the United States. Some of the greatest novelists writing in English have been women: Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. As women’s creativity seems to find a natural outlet infiction, it’s not surprising that women should be attracted to fiction’s most popular form.
    And women have, I think, natural advantages, particularly that eye for detail, for the minutiae of everyday living, which is so important in clue-making. George Orwell has said that murder, the unique crime, should arise only from strong emotions, and here too women can be pre-eminent since they have a greater interest in those strong emotions than they have in violence or weaponry. I expect, too, that women find the conventions and the form both satisfying and supportive. Thus psychologically buttressed, we can deal with violent events and emotions with greater security than we could in any other form of fiction. The detective story