Although I have written perhaps twenty or thirty short stories over many years, the prospect of a collection of them was initially both daunting and thrilling. Would readers be put off by this sudden change of format? Only time will tell. But gradually I recalled some quite brilliant stories I had read and enjoyed, by Celia Fremlin, Roald Dahl, Saki, Piers Anthony, and others. Most of them were at least as memorable and delightful as any novel I had read. Then I remembered hearing Chaz Brenchley (a master of the short story) say a writer has more space and freedom in a story than in a novel. I wasn’t sure what he meant until I began writing these tales. Now I understand – I think.
As a reader of short stories I am aware of the effort demanded to engage with a new world and new set of characters, time after time. It is, perhaps, one of the factors that puts people off them. But here I have cheated. All the stories in this collection feature Thea Osborne (now Slocombe) or Drew or someone close to them, set in the Cotswolds villages and towns that feature in my series of novels about Thea and her house-sitting. The world will be familiar to existing readers, and for anyone coming to them for the first time, it has a consistency that I hope will reduce the resistance.
Perhaps it should also be said that while Thea’s world has a geographical accuracy, there are quite a few chronological anomalies in these stories when related to the novels.
There is also a minor element in the stories that might be called a game. Each story refers in some way to one (sometimes more than one) of the Cotswold novels. Either a character from it, or the place in which it is set, or something subtler. Here and there I have altered details of events or characters in order to avoid revealing too much of the plots in the novels. The key is at the back of the book.