Phil Rickman

• Born: Unknown
• Place of Birth: Lancashire, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Thriller; psychological; amateur sleuth

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Reverend Merrily Watkins, 1998-2022; Marco, 2006-2007; John Dee Papers, 2010-2012

Contribution

Phil Rickman began his career as a novelist with Candlenight (1991) and Crybbe (1993), novels that mixed Celtic and British mythology with supernatural elements and a strong regional flavor. His effective use of supernatural suspense led him to be considered a horror writer, a label he has worked to change. Although his early work was sometimes compared to that of Stephen King and ghost-story writer M. R. James, Rickman told interviewer David Mathew that he did not identify himself as a horror writer, nor did he feel that he fit into any other category, genre, or subgenre. His first five novels, from Candlenight to The Chalice (1997), mixed folklore, history, and mysticism, providing subtle chills rather than the fantastic events and outright gore that had come to dominate the horror genre. Although these novels were moderately successful, most critics agree that Rickman found his true voice with The Wine of Angels (1998), his first Merrily Watkins mystery.

The Merrily Watkins books can be classified as crime novels because the investigation of a crime, usually murder, features prominently in most of the novels. Still, they also allow Rickman to explore mythology, religion, gender and sexuality, rural life, and the conflicts between natives and outsiders and between tradition and change in modern-day Britain. In The Wine of Angels, the persecution for witchcraft of a seventeenth-century vicar who may or may not have been gay leads to conflicts and resentments within present-day Ledwardine. A Crown of Lights (2001) finds Merrily caught in the middle of a conflict between neopagans and Christians, while The Smile of a Ghost (2005) uses medieval Ludlow Castle, a real-life castle on the Welsh border, as the setting for mysterious suicides and a possible haunting. In The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (2004), Merrily’s daughter Jane takes a job at Stanner Hall, a hotel on the Welsh border in a village that may have been the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902-1902). Despite ghosts and other mysterious forces, Rickman’s novels achieve a strong sense of realism through their lifelike and vivid depictions of landscapes and people along the rural border of England and Wales. Along with numerous stand-alone novels and other much briefer series, Rickman has continued his Merrily Watkins mysteries into the twenty-first century with titles including The Fabric of Sin (2007), To Dream of the Dead (2008), The Secrets of Pain (2011), The Magus of Hay (2013), Friends of the Dusk (2015), All of a Winter's Night (2017), and The Fever of the World (2022). His Merrily Watkins series has also been adapted to British television.

Biography

Philip Rickman was born in Lancashire, England, a county infamous for its seventeenth-century witch trials. His interest in writing began as a child, with “mysteries, spy stories—whatever I was into at the time.” At eighteen, he got a job at a newspaper. He began a successful career in journalism, eventually writing and producing pieces for Radio Wales and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) Radio 4. A documentary he wrote and presented, Aliens, won the Wales Current Event Affairs Reporter of the Year award in 1987. The program, about the rise in English people moving to Wales, drawn by cheap land and their not always warm reception by Welsh natives, was the inspiration for Rickman’s first novel, Candlenight, published in 1991 after several publishers rejected it for not fitting their template of a horror novel. In an interview originally published in The New Writer, Rickman said that one publisher turned the book down because of its humorous passages: horror novels were not supposed to be funny. With the encouragement of writer and editor Alice Thomas Ellis, Rickman published Candlenight, which received mostly good reviews.

Crybbe, Rickman’s first novel to be released in the United States (as Curfew), was a more explicitly spooky work that took a satirical look at New Age devotees who come to a sleepy village determined to unlock its ancient magic, not understanding that some elemental forces are best left contained. His second novel was successful enough for Rickman to devote most of his time to fiction. Three more supernatural novels followed: The Man in the Moss (1994), inspired when Rickman’s wife, Carol, suggested he do a book about bog bodies; December (1994), a ghost story involving the murder of John Lennon; and The Chalice (1997), which drew on some of Rickman’s earlier research on the search for the Holy Grail.

Tired of having his complex works classed as horror, Rickman began work on a story he thought would be closer to one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books than to a novel by Anne Rice. Rickman’s Reverend Merrily Watkins was originally conceived as a supporting character, but she soon took over his imagination and his new novel, The Wine of Angels. Rickman told Counterculture magazine that he conceived of a plot with supernatural elements that could be resolved in the real world. As he wrote, Rickman realized that he had created something unique.

Although other authors such as Ellis Peters had used the device of a clerical sleuth, no character quite like Merrily Watkins—a woman vicar and professional exorcist who also investigates crimes—had ever been seen before. Both critics and readers gave Merrily a warm welcome, and Rickman found himself the creator of a successful mystery series, turning out books at the rate of about one per year. Rickman has stayed with the Merrily character, but, at the same time, he has experimented with other genres of fiction. He has written two mystery novels under the Will Kingdom pseudonym, featuring a police detective. In 2006 and 2007, he published two young-adult novels, Marco’s Pendulum and Marco and the Blade of Night, as Thom Madley.

Rickman has said that while fiction writing is his main avocation, he never formally quit journalism and still produces radio programs and the occasional newspaper piece. Most notably, he has worked as a writer and presenter of Phil the Shelf, a book program for BBC Radio Wales. The author’s website describes it as an irreverent and sometimes controversial program with author interviews and discussions of popular and genre fiction. Rickman has also produced music that he believes serves as an accompaniment to his novels.

Analysis

Phil Rickman’s novels create a fictional world that might be called cozy in another writer’s hands. His stories are set in rural villages where everybody knows everybody else and in quaint old towns rich in history, with castles, cathedrals, and humorously gruff local characters. The author subverts this pretty picture, however, sometimes with murder and supernatural dread and sometimes by a realistic depiction of the animosity between the romantic views of visitors and newcomers and the more practical attitude of the local people. His use of detail to build a credible, fully imagined background makes the intrusion of the supernatural more disturbing because what happens does not occur in some fantasy world but in a real place. Rickman’s journalism background is evident in the research he does for each book; as a whole, his work provides a wealth of information about paranormal phenomena, traditional English and Welsh folklore, pagan beliefs, the workings of the Anglican church, and what Rickman calls “earth-mysteries,” formations such as Stonehenge.

In an interview, Rickman discussed his approach to the occult as another aspect of real life. When he writes about the paranormal, he does not treat it as fantasy or horror. He uses a basis of documentary realism to write about the work of exorcist-priest Merrily and the politics involved with her job. However, he admits that Merrily’s real-life equivalent would not be involved in as many criminal investigations as she is.

Crybbe

Crybbe is probably the most successful of Rickman’s early novels and was the first to be released in the United States. According to the author, his American publishers renamed the novel Curfew because they thought Americans would not know how to pronounce the original title. In retrospect, he said, he felt that Curfew was a better title. In many ways, this nonseries novel is a precursor to the Merrily Watkins series: It is set in a village not far from Ledwardine, features a clerical hero, and marks the first appearance of Gomer Parry, a local contractor.

Crybbe, an isolated village between England and Wales, has been left to itself for centuries, and most who live there follow the old traditions, such as the nightly ringing of the church bell marking curfew, without question. When a millionaire record producer, inspired by the writings of a local paranormal investigator, comes to town with a plan to make Crybbe a New Age mecca, ancient forces begin to stir. Faye Morrison, a reporter stranded with her vicar father in Crybbe, does some digging into the sinister origins of village traditions. Rickman uses real folklore elements—“ley-lines” around the town, marked by ancient, Stonehenge-like rock formations—and creates a convincing sense of enclosure and paranoia. Publishers Weekly praised Curfew for its stylish treatment of occult themes.

The Wine of Angels

The Wine of Angels marks the first appearance of Merrily Watkins. In this novel, she is not yet a diocesan deliverance consultant and is still finding her way as a priest, struggling with a crisis of faith, a rebellious daughter, and a seemingly haunted house. It does not help that within her first few weeks as a priest in charge of Ledwardine, an old village that some newer residents are trying to develop as a tourist site, she witnesses a gruesome apparent suicide and faces sexism from parishioners and outright hostility from James Bull-Davies, heir to the local manor. While Merrily struggles with nightmares and horrific visions, her fifteen-year-old daughter Jane has a mystical experience in the apple orchard and takes up with Lucy Devenish, an eccentric shopkeeper rumored to be a bit of a witch. Then Colette Cassidy, the wild daughter of a newcomer family, goes missing, and Merrily finds herself in the midst of murder and mysteries, both ancient and modern.

The novel draws on traditional folklore regarding fairies, apples, and cider but places these topics in a modern setting, with a satirical subplot about the appropriation of the past. Controversy erupts when a gay playwright champions the cause of a seventeenth-century cleric charged with witchcraft, deciding, on no particular evidence, that homophobia was the true reason for his persecution. Gomer Parry, a “digger-driver” and contractor in Ledwardine, muses on sanitizing the village, with art galleries where slaughterhouses once stood and gourmet restaurants instead of rough-and-tumble pubs.

The Wine of Angels, named after Ledwardine’s famous apple cider, introduces Lol Robinson, a troubled singer-songwriter (his idol is suicidal musician Nick Drake) trying to escape his past. He becomes a romantic interest for Merrily as the series develops. Jane, though sometimes a trial to her mother, emerges as a strong and sensible character who helps Merrily unravel the town’s mysteries. Gomer, transplanted from Crybbe, offers his unique perspective on local goings-on. Merrily spends much of the novel racked by self-doubt. Still, she emerges as a compassionate and determined woman, a spiritual leader strong enough to face the challenges her future position as exorcist will demand.

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

At some point, every mystery writer must address the long shadow of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (2004) is Rickman’s nod to Sherlock Holmes. In this novel, Merrily Watkins’s sixth outing, Rickman explores the possibility that the origin for Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) was not Dartmoor but Herefordshire on the Welsh border. Ben Foley, a television producer, hosts murder-mystery weekends at Stanner Hall, an old mansion turned hotel. Proving his theory that Doyle’s hound was based on a local legend of a black dog that presaged death would be a sure path to profit, Foley thinks, but others are not so sure of his methods.

When Jane Watkins, now seventeen, gets her first job at Stanner Hall, Merrily becomes drawn into a real-life mystery involving an ancient family curse, a medieval exorcism, and the potentially dangerous Sebbie Dacre, an alcoholic landowner with a bad temper and a worse family history.

In an afterword, Rickman describes how his research for a BBC radio program called The Return of the Hound led to the writing of The Prayer of the Night Shepherd. The setting details and the legends of the hound are drawn from his reading and interviews with area residents. The novel’s sense of realism includes photos of Herefordshire landmarks and quotations from Ella Mary Leather’s The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire (1912) interspersed with the text. The various plot threads are woven together seamlessly, and many reviewers called The Prayer of the Night Shepherd one of Rickman's finest works.

Principal Series Characters:

• Merrily Watkins is an Anglican priest who comes to the small village of Ledwardine as parish priest and later becomes a “deliverance consultant,” or exorcist, for the diocese of Hereford. A single mother widowed at a young age, Merrily struggles to prove herself as an attractive woman in a traditionally male domain. Merrily is an unabashed nicotine addict who often questions herself as a priest, mother, and woman, lending her character an appealing realism and vulnerability.
• Jane Watkins, Merrily’s resourceful, independent, and often rebellious teenage daughter, is initially skeptical about church matters and her mother’s decision to enter the priesthood, but she discovers a spiritual sensitivity in herself, a quality her mother shares. Her adolescent growing pains are rendered without apology, making Jane a strong character some readers love but others hate.
• Lol Robinson is a melancholy, sensitive songwriter and musician, the former head of a briefly popular rock band, Hazey Jane. Lol came to Ledwardine to escape his past; deeply depressed after his girlfriend leaves him for the local squire, he begins a tentative relationship with Merrily.

Bibliography

“Books by Phil Rickman and Complete Book Reviews.” Publisher's Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/phil-rickman.html. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

Counterculture. “Phil Rickman: Exorcising Crime with Merrily Watkins.” Interview. http://www.counterculture.co.uk/interview/phil-rickman.html.

Humphreys, Simon. "Review of 'The Remains of an Altar,' by Phil Rickman." Mail on Sunday, 31 Dec. 2006, p. 60.

Phil Rickamn - Author, www.philrickman.co.uk. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

Savill, Richard. “The Dubious Pedigree of the Baskerville Hound.” The Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2004, p. 5.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005.