Crime in a pre-internet, pre-mobile era from Chichester novelist Greg Mosse

Murder at Church Lodge is published this summer; it will be followed by Murder at Bunting Manor in November 2023; Murder at Chichester Theatre in March 2024; and the Murder at Notre Dame later that year, four books in the Maisie Cooper mystery series, all released through Hodder & Stoughton, books set in the Sussex countryside in the early 1970s “where the villages are picturesque but secrets and murders abound.”

“Having just published a book, The Coming Darkness, set in 2037, half a generation into the future and influenced by the pandemic and all the crisis of environmental degradation, I went back to the idea that I had had before 2020 which was for a cosy-crime series which would be set in the village where I lived when I was 11 years old in 1972. The other part of it is that though I have disguised the names of the places, all just to the north-west of Chichester, anybody with any knowledge of south-west Sussex would be able to identify them. And there is one point where the hero jumps on her bike and cycles into Chichester. The reason for 1972 is that my memories of being an 11-year-old are incredibly vivid. When I was 11 my life was not full of half a century or so of life, of frustration, of triumph, half a century of existence. Everything was fresh and everything left such a strong impression on me”

In Murder at Church Lodge, Maisie Cooper returns to her childhood home to visit the brother she hasn’t seen in years but when she arrives, she discovers he’s been murdered. Determined not to leave all the investigating to the police – and trying not to be distracted by the handsome lead detective – Maisie does some digging of her own and starts to uncover a sinister mystery at the heart of a perfect village… A big part of the attraction for Greg is that Maisie is operating in a very different world: “The story is around her brother's death and she gets in touch with an old friend of his who drives down from London because as far as he is concerned telephones are not secure. If it was a Jack Reacher book he would have a burner phone or if it was a book set in the future they would be contacting each other on the dark web, but now in this book he has to drive down to Sussex to see her in person to be absolutely sure.

“Totally it's about nostalgia and that's the world that I want to capture, that world that is so vivid, that is so full of social divisions between the church and the non-church and between the land owners and tenants and so on – all those divisions that are so fruitful for resentment and potentially for murder. I knew a few people back then that over the years that followed as they went into adolescence and adulthood went into the army and that was my ambition too. But I did a school play and because I enjoyed the school play so much I went to Goldsmith’s College and did drama and English instead. My life really turned on that moment of being cast in the school play but I did have that moment of preparing to go into the army immediately after A levels and I gave that moment to Maisie.”

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