The Marblehead notebook

The town in which Martha Bancroft lives is a real one. The cottage on Front Street is invented. The cat, regrettably, is real.

I am sometimes asked whether Martha lives in a fictional town based on Marblehead, or in Marblehead itself. The answer is the second one. There seemed no reason to invent a coastline I already had on my doorstep, and Marblehead has the additional advantage — vital, in a series like this — of being a town in which retired people are taken seriously.

The granite is pink in some lights and grey in others and almost never the colour the postcards suggest. The harbour goes still in the late afternoon and turns a kind of antique blue, like the cloth on the back of an old book. The herring gulls are loud, possessive, and sometimes wrong. There is a chandlery on State Street where one can still buy oilskin and where, I am told, no transaction has ever required a receipt.

I keep a notebook for the town. This is not the same as a research notebook, which is what writers are supposed to keep and which I do also keep — a thicker, sterner book bound in dark linen, full of sources and shelfmarks and the occasional argument with myself. The Marblehead notebook is smaller, brown, and contains nothing of consequence. It contains things like:

The man at the chandlery wears the same jumper on Tuesdays. It is pulled out at the elbow on the right. He never reads me my total — he shows me the till.

A woman walks her terrier on Front Street at 4:47 every weekday. The terrier has views.

March 14: light off the water at four o'clock, almost gold, almost wrong. Pliny refused to look at it.

The bell at Old North is a half-second slow. I have begun to find this comforting.

I keep the notebook because Martha keeps the town. She keeps it the way old residents keep their towns — by knowing which mailboxes have been there since before the post code, which front gardens lost their hedges in the 1991 storm, which neighbour will not look you in the eye since their daughter moved to California.

She keeps the town the way a librarian keeps a periodical: by understanding what is missing this month.

It is, I think, the single most useful skill an amateur sleuth can have. Not deduction. Not method. Familiarity — the kind of familiarity that lets you know, without quite knowing how you know, that the wrong person is sitting in the chandlery at 4:47.

There is no scene like this in The Empress's Wake, because The Empress's Wake takes place mostly at sea, and Martha's familiarity has to be constructed at speed from cabin numbers and dining schedules. The Marginal Hand moves the test to a country house in Herefordshire, where Martha has only a fortnight to learn what a place is missing.

But the notebook is the engine underneath both. The notebook is what makes Martha possible. And I think — though I am hardly impartial — that it is what will make her possible at seventy-five and at seventy-eight and at eighty-one, when the rest of her acuity is being asked, gently, to reduce.

She will keep the notebook. So will I.

I have other footnotes. — C.H.