Sutton Coldfield – The Real Location Behind Deadly Fallout
Sutton Coldfield is a leafy suburb in the north of Birmingham, and it's where Deadly Fallout, book 6 in my Detective Zoe Finch series, opens. For Deadly Fallout, I went home. Let me tell you about the corner of Birmingham where I set it, and the personal places woven into it.
Is Sutton Coldfield part of Birmingham?
The book opens in Boldmere, which is part of Sutton Coldfield, which is part of Birmingham – although you'd struggle to get some of its residents to admit that last bit.
Sutton Coldfield has a strong sense of itself as a separate place, a town in its own right, a cut above the rest of the city. I can say all this with affection, because I grew up there. It's leafy, comfortable, the kind of suburb where bad things aren't supposed to happen – which is, of course, exactly why I chose it. After the airport in Deadly Terror and the university in Deadly Reprisal, I wanted to swing the series back to the north, and to the green, well-heeled streets I knew as a child.
There's something I find irresistible about setting a dark crime in a place that prides itself on its respectability. The contrast does half the work for you. A body in Boldmere is far more unsettling than a body somewhere you'd expect one.
A house I once viewed
Here's a small confession about this book. One of the houses in it is based on a real house – one I actually viewed, years before I wrote Deadly Fallout, when I was looking to buy somewhere. I remember walking through it, picturing a life in it, the way you do.
I'm not going to tell you where that house is, or whether it sold, or to whom. The owners have done nothing to deserve being attached to a murder, even a fictional one, and I'd rather not land them with the association. But the layout you move through in the book, the feel of those rooms – that came from a real afternoon of house-hunting, filed away in a writer's magpie memory and pulled out years later for a purpose the estate agent definitely didn't have in mind.
Edgbaston Reservoir
The other location I want to mention takes us back across the city to Edgbaston – though to a rather less leafy part of it than the genteel streets where Deadly Wishes was set.
Edgbaston Reservoir is one of those quietly atmospheric Birmingham places: a great sheet of water sitting almost in the middle of the city, ringed by paths, popular with walkers and sailors and people who just need to get away from the traffic for half an hour. It has a stillness to it that can tip, in the right light, into something eerier. What happens there in Deadly Fallout, you'll have to read the book to find out.
Home ground
What ties these places together is that they're all home ground for me. Sutton Coldfield, where I grew up. The green north of the city. Edgbaston, in its different moods.
Setting this book in the Birmingham I know best, in the suburbs that raised me, gave the whole thing a grounded, personal weight that I hope you'll feel as you read: the streets I grew up on, the water I've walked beside, the kind of comfortable suburb that would much rather pretend none of this could happen on its doorstep.
Real locations in Deadly Fallout
Sutton Coldfield
Boldmere
Edgbaston Reservoir
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New to the series? Start with Deadly Wishes, or get the prequel novella Deadly Origins free.
