Lyme Regis – The Real Town Behind The Fossil Beach Murders and the Jurassic Coast Mysteries
Lyme Regis, on the Dorset–Devon border at the western end of the Jurassic Coast, is the setting for two of my series. It's where DCI Lesley Clarke investigates in The Fossil Beach Murders, book six of the Dorset Crime series. And it's home to the Jurassic Coast Mysteries, a cosy mystery series starting with The Swimming Club. Here's why I keep coming back to it.
Why does Lyme Regis feel so familiar?
Lyme Regis is a place many of us become vaguely aware of long before we visit. Whether that's by reading Jane Austen's Persuasion at school, watching Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman, or learning about Mary Anning at London's Natural History Museum, it has tentacles that reach far beyond the small space the town itself takes up.
Lyme itself isn't big. It has a permanent population of around 3,500, which can reach 20,000 in the summer. And it's smaller than it feels, because it runs straight into the village of Uplyme, which is actually in Devon. Go for a walk along the Lyme valley and you'll cross into another county without even realising.
It's hugely popular with tourists, and it's infamous for its seagulls. I once bought a breakfast bagel at the kiosk on the beach and was handed a brolly to protect myself from their dive-bombing.
Out of season is when I love it most. It's big enough to have lots of interesting landmarks, features and people, but small enough to keep the sense of community you usually find in a village.
Fossil hunting in Lyme Regis
If you're into palaeontology and have infinite patience and an eagle eye, you can go fossil hunting. The Lyme Regis Museum has a resident fossil-hunting instructor, Paddy Howe. He famously taught Kate Winslet how to hunt for fossils when she was preparing to film Ammonite, and he took me out with a group of family and friends one August morning to have a go ourselves.
We had seven children with us: some fascinated, some bored out of their minds, and some insisting that every pebble they picked up was a fossil. Sadly we didn't find anything particularly interesting, but it was fun to learn about the local geology and to be warned, again and again, not to go near the cliffs.
Landslips and The Fossil Beach Murders
Those warnings matter. There's a constant danger of landslips, with the Jurassic clay prone to breaking away when rain trickles through fissures in the rock and loosens it from the layer underneath. You have to watch out for it on the beach and the coast path, which is closed or diverted every now and then. Since I started walking it around twenty years ago, the route has become more wobbly, diverting inland around unstable sections and taking walkers more than a mile from the cliffs in places.
I knew I had to use that danger in the book. The Fossil Beach Murders opens with a landslip at the Spittles, the cliffs outside town that are famous both for their dangerous walking conditions and their fossil finds. When the cliff face comes tumbling down to the sea, it reveals more than ancient fossils. Two bodies are discovered, and Lesley's investigation begins.
Lyme Regis is on the opposite side of the county from Lesley's home in Bournemouth, too far to travel every day. So she and Tina Abbott need somewhere to stay locally, and they end up at the home of Tina's mum, Annie, on Anning Road.
Annie treats Lesley like visiting royalty: hovering, making endless cups of tea (and coffee, once Tina reminds her that the boss likes it strong), and telling everyone Lesley is a 'positive role model' for her daughter. For Tina, having her boss stay at her mum's house is excruciating.
As for Lesley, Lyme Regis is all a bit claustrophobic. She's used to a city of a quarter of a million people, and now she's somewhere the buildings feel like they're closing in and everyone knows everyone else's business. That's useful when you're looking for witnesses in a murder investigation. But would Lesley want to live there? I think not. And as for the steps from the beach to the car park... well, we all know how Lesley feels about steep climbs.
Why I set a cosy mystery series in Lyme Regis
I visited Lyme plenty of times while I was researching The Fossil Beach Murders, but I always wanted to write more stories there. There's so much material: the harbour, the beaches, the fossils, the hills and alleyways, the shops. Everyone who's been has fond memories of the place, whether it's sitting on the pebbly beach, fossil hunting towards Charmouth or climbing the steep hills. When I tell people I'm writing a series set there, their faces light up.
After Millie Ravensworth and I finished our London Cosy Mysteries, moving to Lyme Regis seemed obvious. (Millie Ravensworth is actually two people, Heide Goody and Iain Grant.) So we created a spin-off for Tina Abbott and her family. Annie is a bit of a character. She and Lesley cross swords, metaphorically speaking, in The Fossil Beach Murders, and I knew there was plenty of scope to give her some stories of her own.
We wanted Annie to have a group of sidekicks, a group of female friends. And what activity in Lyme Regis might bring a disparate group of women together and forge real bonds between them? Swimming.
Swimming in Lyme Regis at 6 a.m.
Lyme has a beautiful, sheltered harbour, which makes it possible to swim here all year round. Unlike the longer beaches to the east, the curve of the harbour breaks the fiercest waves, so you can swim at times of year you wouldn't consider in Bournemouth or Southbourne.
Of course, we needed to do some research. So Heide, Iain and I spent a night above a pub in Lyme Regis and met at 6 a.m. to try early-morning swimming for ourselves.
It was May. The sun wasn't shining. It was chilly.
The other swimmers dotted around the beach looked like they knew what they were doing. They had the proper gear: swimming hats, flotation devices, waterproof pouches. We had plastic bags with towels in. I didn't even bring a change of clothes. I just pulled my shorts on over my cossie afterwards, and I regretted that.
But we were there to swim, and swim we did. Heide and I plunged in more enthusiastically than Iain, and the look on his face was quite a picture. Once we'd got used to the temperature, it was wonderful: swimming around the calm bay, watching the boats and the seagulls, chatting and laughing. We didn't stay in long. But the best thing about cold-water swimming is the feeling of having done it. We spent the rest of the day feeling very smug.
I enjoyed it so much that I now swim regularly off Bournemouth beach. If The Swimming Club inspires you to try open-water swimming, do it with friends or a group, do your research first, pick a safe spot, and ideally try it for the first time in the summer months.
The Cobb, and why writers keep coming back to it
In the second Jurassic Coast Mystery, The Empty Easel, the swimming club's morning swim is disturbed by a body in the water near the Cobb.
The Cobb has been the setting for many literary exploits. I have to admit I haven't read The French Lieutenant's Woman, but the image of Meryl Streep in her cloak at the end of the Cobb, with the waves sweeping around her, is etched on my brain from the film poster. And in Jane Austen's Persuasion, Louisa Musgrove falls down the steps on the Cobb, which sets a whole series of events in motion.
I'm not surprised she fell. Those steps are incredibly wonky, very steep and narrow. There are plenty of signs telling you not to use them in strong weather, but it's hard to resist. And let's face it, the wind is very rarely not blowing on the Cobb.
The Cobb was built to protect the harbour, and it now gives calmer water to boats and to open-water swimmers like me and the ladies of the swimming club. Who'd have thought a great big stone breakwater would still fascinate people hundreds of years after it was built? But it does. I strongly recommend standing on top of it on a day when the weather is just shy of tipping over into too dangerous, when the wind whistles round your ears and the waves crash against the stones. It's truly atmospheric.
Real locations in The Fossil Beach Murders
Lyme Regis harbour and the Cobb
Anning Road (where Tina grew up)
The caravan park near the beach
Charmouth
The Spittles (the cliffs where the bodies are found)
Hill Street and Lyme Regis police station
Charmouth Road car park (and those infamous steps)
Read more
Free novellas: The Ballard Down Murder (Dorset Crime) and The Missing Corpse (Jurassic Coast Mysteries).
