Many World War II mysteries are set in London, often during the Blitz. So it was only natural for us (the husband-and-wife team of Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, writing as Eric Reed) to send our protagonist, Grace Baxter, up to Newcastle-on-Tyne at the opposite end of England. Why keep repeating what’s been done so many times before? Especially when one of the coauthors spent her early life in Newcastle. The northeastern city did not suffer the amount of bombing other large industrial centres endured, perhaps because Hitler hoped to preserve its factories for his own eventual use. In 1941, however, residents must have gone to sleep every night wondering whether they would wake up under an all-out attack by the Luftwaffe.
We have taken poetic license—or perhaps we should say poetic building permit—to place two imaginary streets, Chandler and Carter, just south of Newcastle’s West Road and west of Condercum Road. Today easily accessible census records show who lived in every house on every street in the area. By placing characters at a precise location we feared inadvertently press-ganging real World War II city residents into service on the fictional ship Ruined Stones.
Otherwise the city is depicted as it was in 1941 and the scanty ruins we describe still exist. During the 1930s, casts of the temple altars replaced the originals now displayed in the Great North Museum in Newcastle. Antenociticus was a Celtic god, unknown aside from the Benwell temple, although in 2013 a sculpted head with similarities to the one discovered in Benwell was excavated at Binchester Roman Fort in County Durham.
We admit to not being able to verify any deaths at the ruins. These must be chalked up to that invaluable trait of historical mystery writers, sheer bloody cheek.
We did not, however, invent the Cone of Power which Cyril Rutherford so patriotically attempted to perform. It has been claimed that such a ritual was performed in August 1940 in the New Forest. It was intended to prevent the Nazis from invading Britain and, judging by history, it succeeded.
Finally, the reader will notice a smattering of Geordie dialect, as much a part of Newcastle’s atmosphere as its sooty fogs in the period in which the book is set. We have included just enough words and phrases to provide a bit of ambience. The American half of the writing team can attest that to an outsider Geordie sounds like a foreign language.