The Farlington Marsh Murders by Pauline Rowson is the eighth outing for DI Andy Horton. The following extract, quoted with the kind permission of the author, centres on Tipner Lake. When ex con, Daryl Woodley is found dead on the marshes bordering Langstone Harbour the Intelligence Directorate believe his murder is linked to big time crook Marty Stapleton currently serving time in prison. DI Horton is not so sure. He attends Woodley’s funeral in the hope it will give them a lead in an investigation that has drawn a blank at every turn. It does but not in the way he or anyone expected. A body is found on a rotting boat being salvaged in Portsmouth Harbour throws Horton into a complex and frustrating investigation. As the tension mounts to solve the case, Horton receives a chilling message; time, it seems, is also running out for him personally.

The trilling of his mobile phone woke him. Scrambling to answer it, he registered it was daylight and six twenty-three. A call at this hour could only mean one thing: work.

“We’ve got a suspicious death, sir. PCs Somerfield and Seaton are at the scene.”

“Where?” asked Horton, fully awake and heading for the shower.

“The former Tipner Boatyard.”

That was on the western shores of the city and the opposite side of town from his marina. It was a stone’s throw from the commercial ferry port, ten minutes from the police station by car, and about fifteen on the Harley before the rush-hour traffic. He remembered reading that the boatyard had been sold for re-development a couple of years ago and that a salvage operation had only recently begun. They were clearing a Second World War munitions barge from the seabed and he wondered if a skeleton had been discovered during the clearance operation. He asked for more details.

“Sorry, sir, don’t have them,” came the unsatisfactory answer. Horton didn’t waste time enquiring why.

“OK, tell them I’m on my way.”

He ran an electric razor over his chin and was on his Harley heading there within ten minutes, mentally preparing himself for what he might see and hoping that it was a long-ago fatality rather than a recent one. He headed west and then north and soon was turning off the main road and travelling through the narrow streets of terraced houses, which reminded him of Daryl Woodley because this was where he had lived and where Reggie Thomas and the rest of Woodley’s associates still did. Again he considered what was nagging at the back of his mind about the Woodley investigation. It hadn’t surfaced during sleep. As he turned off by the allotments and rode under the motorway bridge onto the small peninsula that butted out on to the upper reaches of Portsmouth harbour, he again tried to conjure up the elusive thought but it refused to come. No matter. It might occur to him later.

He pulled into the boatyard and parked beside the police car. PC Kate Somerfield broke off her conversation with a suntanned, muscular man in his late forties standing beside a van, and headed towards him. There was a frown of concern on her fair face and he thought she looked paler than usual, which didn’t bode well.

“The body’s on the wreckage, sir,” she greeted him sombrely.

Body, not bones then, so a recent death. That certainly wasn’t the news he had wanted.

Pauline Rowson was born in Fareham, but raised and educated in Portsmouth, where she developed an abiding love of the sea which ultimately led her to set her popular crime novels against its ever-changing backdrop. She is the author of twenty-two crime novels – some featuring the rugged and flawed Portsmouth based detective; four in the mystery thriller series featuring Art Marvik a former Royal Marine Commando who is now an undercover investigator for the UK’s National Intelligence Marine Squad (NIMS); and two standalone thrillers, In For The Kill and the award winning In Cold Daylight (both 2006), voted third in an online poll as the most popular novel for World Book Day 2008. She is also the author of the 1950s mystery series featuring Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alun Ryga, who is sent out to solve baffling coastal crimes. Her latest novels are Death in the Dunes and Death in the Harbour (both 2020). Perhaps of most interest to Portsmouth readers are Pauline’s Solent Mystery Murders series, featuring D.I. Andy Horton and a host of locations in and around the city. The series of 17 novels includes The Portsmouth Murders and The Langstone Harbour Murders. Pauline is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and the Society of Authors.

Her crime novels are highly acclaimed in the UK, USA and Commonwealth and have been translated into several languages. Described as multi-layered, fast-paced, and compelling, hailed as ‘The Best of British Crime Fiction’, and commended by The Book Depository for ‘choosing locations and plot lines that are unique to her “marine mysteries” she has set herself apart from the tried and tested formulae within the genre’.

In America, her Portsmouth-based crime novels have been compared in a Booklist review to those ‘in the upper echelons of American procedurals, by Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh and their British counterparts, including the work of Peter Robinson and John Harvey’, and commended for introducing ‘many subtle variations on the procedural formula, including very interesting relationships between Andy and a couple of his superiors’.

Many of Pauline’s characters are drawn from her experiences of life in Portsmouth. From a working-class background, with limited access to books, Pauline is a passionate supporter of public libraries and attributes much of her success to having been introduced to a new small library as a child – The Alderman Lacey Library, Tangier Road, Portsmouth (opened 1964) which gave her a lifelong love of reading, fuelled her ambition to study and inspired her to become a writer. Rowson moved to 2, Teignmouth Road, Copnor at the age of 3, and attended Westover Infants School and Langstone Junior Girls School. Rowson failed the 11 plus but passed the 12 plus in the top tier and was offered a place at Southern Grammar School for Girls (now the Priory School), but, to her parents’ amazement turned down opting to attend Milton Secondary Modern Girls School (now a primary school), a small, excellent girls school that had a GCE O-Level stream. Top of the class throughout her time there, Rowson achieved seven O Levels, and three Grade 1 CSEs. She went on to Highbury College for A-levels but dropped out after a year to marry her husband Bob at the tender age of seventeen. Rowson and her husband, moved out of the city when Bob joined the RAF Police and then Hampshire Fire and Rescue as a firefighter. During this time, Rowson studied English and other subjects at night school, returning to Highbury College to achieve a HNC in Business Studies with Marketing, and gained a postgraduate Marketing Diploma at Southampton Solent University.

The Rowsons lived in Stanley Avenue, Copnor for a short time after returning to Portsmouth, and Rowson worked in Portsmouth Jobcentre, Lake Road, and the Professional and Executive Recruitment, Arundel Street, which was part of the Manpower Services Commission (Civil Service) until it was privatised in the 1980s. From 1992 until 2006, Rowson ran her own successful Marketing and PR business with many Portsmouth clients.

When Rowson isn't writing (which isn’t often) she can be found walking the coastal paths on the Isle of Wight and around Langstone and Chichester Harbours looking for a good place to put a (fictional) body.

If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about any of the map entries, please contact the Map Director, Mark Frost: mark.frost@port.ac.uk