IT IS NO SIMPLE TASK to plot and write a good detective novel, but Kate Ellis (1953–) has managed to make it more difficult for herself (and more satisfying for readers) by intertwining her contemporary mysteries with crimes and other events of the past. Born in Liverpool, she came late to the literary world, having worked first as a teacher, an accountant, and a marketer before winning the North West Playwrights’ competition and producing her first book, The Merchant’s House, in 1999.
Fifteen of her novels feature Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson, a policeman of Trinidadian descent who has a degree in archaeology, which comes in useful on more than one of his cases. He and his wife, a teacher, are newly arrived from London in the ancient coastal town of Tradmouth in rural South Devon when the first book begins, and this is where all his cases occur. Modern police procedures are the hallmark of these adventures, though they are always intruded upon and complicated by the discovery of some long-ago mystery. Ellis also has written two novels about Detective Inspector Joe Plantagenet, set in the North Yorkshire town of York (thinly disguised as Eborby), which are grittier than the Peterson series but also involve more than several plotlines that need to be first connected and then unraveled.
“The Odour of Sanctity” was first published in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, edited by Mike Ashley (London, Robinson, 2000).