Why My Crime Will Always Be Cosy - Faith Eckersall in conversation with Jim Carter

Faith will talk about her humorous, Dorset-based crime cosy novels, The Body on the Roundabout and Death by Canape, which were inspired by her career as a news reporter in the county. She’ll explain why, after accidentally leaving journalism for PR, she missed her old newsroom so much, she created one of her own, the stories behind her characters and locations, and why she didn’t initially want to include a crime in her novel!

Book summary: Disgraced hack Harry Hedges decides to rescue his ailing career by reviving an even more ailing weekly newspaper in deepest Dorset. All he has to do is take on the town busybody, locate his proprietor’s lost sister and solve the mystery of the body on the town’s overgrown roundabout. With a news team that includes a Gen-Zer with a secret, a truculent sub-editor and a flea-ridden chocolate Labrador, Harry will have his work cut out.

About Faith: Faith Eckersall enjoyed a 40-year career in ‘the best job in the world’ as a regional newspaper reporter, with more than half of that time spent working in Dorset. A multi award-winning feature-writer, she now freelances for publications including Country Living, the Daily Telegraph and Dorset magazine. She gained her MA in Creative Writing: The Novel from Brunel University in 2015, supervised by Bernardine Evaristo OBE, and in 2018 won the Grazia Women's Prize for Fiction First Chapter Award. The Body on the Roundabout is her first published novel.