Minette Walters

• Born: September 26, 1949
• Place of Birth: Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Psychological; thriller

Contribution

Minette Walters’s psychological thrillers have been compared with those of Agatha Christie, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell, placing her in the tradition of the English crime novel. Walters is not a series mystery writer; each book stands alone, and her novels can be read in any order. Her literary work combines elements of the first-person hard-boiled detective style, the gothic mystery, the feminist desire for strong female characters in the detective tradition, and the epistolary novel. Her novels are character-driven, with an emphasis on the character of the victim as well as of the murder suspects and investigators. Motives become more complex as characters’ backgrounds are slowly revealed. Readers are kept guessing as the multiple possibilities of who murdered the victim and why emerge through plot twists until the last pages. Walters has been called a master of ambiguity; the motives of the characters are never simple or predictable, and sometimes questions remain even after the end of the book. The dark side of human nature is explored through Walters’s characters and plots; readers are uncomfortably aware that murder can be a possible solution to an array of situations. The literary quality of Walters’s work has been recognized by a remarkable number of awards in the United States and Great Britain, including the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award for Fox Evil (2002) in 2003, and the number of bestsellers she has written is evidence of the appeal of her work to readers.

Biography

Minette Walters was born Minette Caroline Mary Jebb on September 26, 1949, in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, north of London. Her father died when she was young. Her mother supplemented his small pension by painting miniature portraits from photographs and managed to send her three children to good boarding schools. Walters attended the Godolphin School in Salisbury, a university preparatory school. She spent six months in a volunteer service program in Israel, then attended Durham University, where she majored in French and German literature.

After earning her degree, Walters worked as a magazine journalist and later as an editor of romance fiction. Unhappy with the quality of the manuscripts she was reading, she began to write short romance novels herself, eventually writing more than thirty of them under a pseudonym that she has never revealed. This romance fiction, written to strict guidelines, served as her apprenticeship.

In 1978, Minette married Alexander Walters, a businessperson. Their first son, Roland, was born in late 1979, followed by Philip in 1982. Walters was a full-time homemaker and mother until her youngest son was in school. During this time, she actively volunteered and ran for local public office. She also renovated three houses with her husband and has written that do-it-yourself tasks are one of her favorite forms of relaxation.

When Walters returned to writing, she shifted from romance to mystery fiction, a genre she had always enjoyed. She has stated that she admired Agatha Christie, , and , whose characters struggle with eternal truths. From Greene, she learned that fiction can be both literary and entertaining. The influence of true crime books also can be seen in her work, reflected in her interests in psychology and criminology.

The Ice House (1992), Walters’s first published crime novel, was a popular and critical success, winning the British Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award for Best First Crime Novel. The Sculptress followed in 1993, based on an idea from her experience as a prison visitor. The Sculptress won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Walters’s third novel, The Scold’s Bridle (1994), won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. Since then, Walters has been writing at the rate of nearly a book per year, and many of her works have won awards and been on bestseller lists. Her books have been published in countries worldwide, and her first five books have been adapted for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to her full-length crime novels, Walters has published feature articles in magazines, short stories, and two novellas.

Walters moved into an eighteenth-century manor in the Dorset countryside with her family. The Breaker (1998) and The Shape of Snakes (2000) are both set in Dorset, and The Shape of Snakes features an eighteenth-century farmhouse needing renovation, reflecting her interest in renovations. Walters continues to be active in volunteer and charitable organizations. In the twenty-first century, she has also remained a highly prolific writer, publishing Fox Evil (2002), Disordered Minds (2003), The Devil's Feather (2005), Chickenfeed (2006), The Chameleon's Shadow (2007), Innocent Victims (2012), A Dreadful Murder (2013), The Cellar (2015), The Swift and the Harrier (2022), and The Players (2024). She has also published two novels in her Black Death series, The Last Hours (2017) and The Turn of Midnight (2018). Her newer novels suggest that Walters has shifted her focus from crime fiction to historical fiction.

Analysis

Minette Walters’s psychological suspense and crime fiction is character-driven. In each case, a body is discovered in the first pages of the novel, and the rest of the novel is spent uncovering the background and circumstances of the murder. The character of the victim is explored along with the character of the suspects and investigators. Motivation, why the murder was committed, is as essential as who did it. A long list of possible suspects is revealed through the plot's twists, turns, and revelations. Walters stated in an interview that she does not necessarily know the murderer's identity when she begins writing the novel; several characters have a motive for the crime. One of the questions Walters explores is why one character was driven to murder as a solution while other equally motivated characters did not resort to murder.

Other characteristics of a Walters mystery include gruesome, graphic descriptions of the crime scene; themes of prejudice, bigotry, and giving the victim a voice; a love element that explores the fragility of relationships, the struggle for love, and the hard work involved in maintaining a stable relationship; the enclosed and claustrophobic nature of life in the family, the village, or neighborhood, where all involved, not only the victim, may be traumatized by a crime; and the dark side of human nature, the idea that the capability for murder may rest within anyone. Walters also explores form in the crime novel. In addition to a traditional narrative, Walters involves the reader in the investigation by including maps, letters, e-mails, records of police interviews, newspaper clippings, and photos without narrative commentary, allowing the reader to interpret the evidence along with the investigator.

The Ice House

Walters’s first novel, The Ice House (1992), has gothic elements in its setting, a manor house called Streech Grange. The Grange is owned by Phoebe Maybury, who lives there in isolation with two eccentric female companions. The novel opens with three newspaper clippings referring to the unsolved disappearance of David Maybury ten years earlier. Although a body was never found, the local villagers, as well as Detective Chief Inspector George Walsh, believe that Phoebe killed her husband. The opening scenes of the narrative focus on a graphic description of a decomposed body found in the cryptlike ice house on the property. The immediate assumption is that the body in the ice house is the missing David Maybury. Still, the investigation is soon complicated by the revelation of another missing person, a man whose business failure has cost Phoebe’s friend Diana Goode a small fortune. As more possible motivations for murder are revealed, it becomes essential to determine the identity of the body in the ice house. Walsh’s determination to prove that Phoebe is guilty of her husband’s murder hinders the investigation from the start, so it falls to the moody misogynist Detective Sergeant McLoughlin to probe other possibilities. The idea that police investigations may be flawed runs through several of Walters’s books. Two stories unfold simultaneously: the story of what really happened ten years earlier and the story of the police investigation in the present time.

The claustrophobic, enclosed nature of village life is another theme that first appears in The Ice House and reappears later in Walter's novels. The locals not only assume that Phoebe killed her husband, generally acknowledged to be a cruel and violent man, but also suspect the three women of being lesbians or witches. Ultimately, the identity of the body is revealed, as is the solution to the disappearance of Maybury. The novel ends with the beginning of a love affair between the gruff McLoughlin and suspected lesbian Ann Cattrell.

By the end of the gripping novel, with its twists and turns of plot, the reader has been involved in the psychology of vengeance and the nature of loneliness and friendship and loyalty among the three women who are protecting Phoebe and her daughter from a secret darker than the possible murder of an abusive husband and father.

The Sculptress

Minette Walters’s second novel, The Sculptress, also opens with a crime already committed. A newspaper clipping refers to the murder conviction of Olive Martin, a young woman who has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murders of her mother and sister. Rosalind “Roz” Leigh, the amateur investigator, is a journalist assigned to write a book about the case. Olive, a grotesquely obese woman, has confessed to the murders but refuses to speak about her motive. Roz, who has recently suffered a significant loss followed by depression, must gain Olive’s confidence through a series of prison visits and give the murderer a voice. As the visits proceed, the tables are sometimes turned, and Olive asks the questions, causing Roz to open up and talk about her life and its disappointments. The psychology of both the murderer and investigator are explored.

Themes of loneliness, trust and distrust, truth and lies, and the claustrophobic nature and secrets of family life are woven into the plot as Roz discovers that there was little police investigation surrounding the murders. Thorough police and defense work was neglected because it was a foregone conclusion that Olive was guilty. As Roz begins to unravel Olive’s past in an attempt to discover why a young woman who appears sane and intelligent, though odd, would commit the brutal murder of her mother and sister, she becomes convinced that Olive is innocent. Therefore, Roz must find the actual murderer and Olive’s motive for confessing to the crime. During her investigation, she interviews a growing number of characters. She becomes involved in a relationship with Hal Hawksley, a retired police officer who was the investigator at the crime scene. The reader’s imagination is engaged as the cast of possible suspects becomes more and more complex.

The novel's ending is the source of Walters’s reputation as a master of ambiguity. Where does fact end and fiction begin? Olive is a skilled manipulator, and while Roz is convinced that Olive is innocent and can prove that the police investigation was flawed, she is never able to definitively prove who the true killer is. In the end, Olive is freed, and as she leaves the prison, a look of gloating triumph on her face causes doubt. Did Olive kill her mother and sister or not?

The Breaker

The Breaker is set in Dorset, where Walters makes her home. As the novel opens, the body of a naked woman is found on an isolated beach. The woman has been raped, strangled, and drowned. Her identity must be established, and her murderer found. Constable Nick Ingram is the hero of the mystery, a local police officer who knows the community's people and the area's tides and waters. Suspects include the drowned woman’s husband and a handsome, rather sleazy, young actor. The cast of characters consists of a pair of lonely women, Maggie Jenner and her mother, who have lost their money to the confident man Maggie married; several police detectives; the severely withdrawn young daughter of the murdered woman; and several local characters and suspects. Records of police interviews and psychologists’ reports punctuate the traditional narrative. Who murdered the woman and why are not revealed until the last pages of the novel. Themes include loneliness, date rape drugs, and child abuse, as well as psychology and possible motives for the murder, while plot and action are never sacrificed in this best-selling, page-turning thriller.

The Shape of Snakes

The Shape of Snakes opens with a twenty-year-old crime. On a rainy night in a London neighborhood, an African Caribbean woman with Tourette’s syndrome, known as Mad Annie, died in the gutter. The police dismissed the death as an accident; they concluded that Annie had wandered into the road and was hit by a truck. The first-person narrator, M, was convinced that Annie was murdered and that racism and indifference by the police led to a cover-up of the crime. M’s accusations of racism caused the neighbors to harass her into silence, and she and her husband moved abroad shortly after the crime.

Twenty years later, M and her husband have returned to England, and M is determined to seek justice for the murdered woman. Her own motives, however, are complicated. Although she seems to be driven by a desire for justice for Annie, her investigation is just as likely to be motivated by a desire for revenge for how she was treated and her subsequent isolation and depression. The nature of life in an urban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else’s business is painfully probed. Revelations are made about the affairs of a vivid and varied cast of characters through letters, police reports, newspaper clippings, photos, and e-mails in addition to traditional narrative. Themes of silence and isolation are explored until readers hear the victim's voice at last in the moving letter on the final page. The ending of this original, emotional, and literary mystery is revealing, yet questions remain. In 2010, The Shape of Snakes was shortlisted for The Best Foreign Honkaku Mystery of the Decade.

Bibliography

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Brewer, Robert Lee. “Minette Walters: On the Impact of War on Ordinary People.” Writer's Digest, 11 July 2022, www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/minette-walters-on-the-impact-of-war-on-ordinary-people. Accessed 23 July 2024.

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Forselius, Tilda Maria. “The Impenetrable M and the Mysteries of Narration: Narrative in Minette Walters’s The Shape of Snakes.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 24, no. 2, winter 2006, pp. 47-61.

James, Dean. “Interview with Minette Walters.” In Deadly Women: The Woman Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion, edited by Jan Grape, Dean James, and Ellen Nehr. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Lebihan, Jill. “Tearing the Heart Out of Secrets: Inside and Outside a Murder Mystery.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, Nov. 2001, pp. 287-295.

Muller, Adrian. “Minette Walters.” In Speaking of Murder: Interviews with the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1998.

Owen, Frances. “Historia Interviews: Minette Walters.” Historia Magazine, 1 Sept. 2022, www.historiamag.com/historia-interviews-minette-walters. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Walters, Minette. Minette Walters Official Website. http://www.minettewalters.co.uk.