Learn about the remote costal environment of southeast England that inspired Nick Guthrie’s latest story, “It’s Complicated,” from our March/April issue, on sale now!
Warren Reach was the perfect rural retreat: a thatched cottage nestled in a strip of pine and birch forest a couple of miles from the Suffolk coast, that could only be reached via a mile-long farm track. The nearest neighbour, apart from the pheasants and the brown hares that might explode almost from under your feet at any point along that track, lived in a farmhouse half a mile away across the fields.
Change the name of the house, and this description taken from my story “It’s Complicated” (in the March/April 2026 issue of AHMM) is a pretty good description of the remote cottage we moved to two and a half years ago.
The story opens with a couple hiding out at Warren Reach, the place cut off after a couple of days’ violent storms that have flooded the roads, while the rough farm track, their only physical connection to the outside world, has been trashed by heavy agricultural vehicles harvesting sugar beet just before the storms.
Shortly after we moved to this remote cottage, we were cut off for a couple of days after…
You get the picture. Sometimes inspiration for a story comes very directly from life. In this case, one morning I went down and peered out of the kitchen window at the water and mud flowing down our track through the woods and I realised that this was actually the set-up for a locked-room mystery, my protagonists isolated not by four walls and a locked door, but by their environment.
All I needed was a body.
The body lay face down in a pool formed by the muddy water that flowed down the track through the trees.
Here we go. An isolated cottage, no way in or out, a corpse . . . What’s not to love?
We didn’t move here with any expectation that it would provide me with such obvious material to write about. Usually, I find it very difficult to write about the place where I’m actually living, because we writers like to bend geography to suit our stories. When I’m actually living somewhere, I’m usually too tightly bound to reality. As soon as I move away from a place, though, I’ll start writing about it, because suddenly I have that balance where the detail is fresh enough for a setting to come alive, but also it’s indistinct enough that I feel free to take a few liberties.
Coastal Suffolk, in the east of England, is different, for some reason. For the first time, I found that I wanted to set stories here and now. The villages are crammed full of history and wonderful characters and legends. The forests and heaths are wild and atmospheric, particularly when those low banks of fog settle on the land, shrouding everything in mystery, or when a storm strikes and the water levels start to creep up.
So what is it about this region that demands to be written about?
This is where you expect a neat answer, isn’t it? Where you trust that the storyteller in me has constructed a clever narrative so that my final argument returns to something hinted at in the opening, and the explanation seems as if it should always have been inevitable.
Well the answer is, I don’t know. I haven’t worked it out yet. All I know is that something compels me to find the characters and the puzzles that help me explore this place. And maybe that’s the answer. I write stories set here because I’m still trying to work it out.
Trace Evidence 