From Graham Hurley, Turnstone (2000):
The bedroom window faced south. The sun was strong through the glass and from here on the slopes of Portsdown Hill, he could see the hazy sprawl of the city stretching away towards the gleam of the Solent and the low swell of the Isle of Wight. There were a 150,000 people down there, jigsawed together in street after street of terraced housing. The parking was non-existent. The traffic was impossible. The schools were falling apart. The kids were out of control. And if you found yourself a job, the pay rates were often pitiful. Yet folk still hung on, glued to the island city by something deeper than habit.

More and more, Faraday found himself asking what it was about the place that made it so particular, so infuriatingly special, but none of the sensible answers did it proper justice. He’d lived here for over twenty years and he’d grown to love the seafront, with its busy views, and the quiet, shadowed cobblestones of Old Portsmouth, still haunted by the tramp of the press gang, but this was the tourists’ Pompey, Flagship Portsmouth, the image that the council loved to peddle on posters nationwide. What it didn’t capture or explain were the subtler glimpses of a very different city. Even at the distance of three generations, poverty and war still seemed to shape the people he dealt with. They expected, and got, very little. A certain stoic resignation seemed to go with the turf. Yet still they managed a smile and a joke with people they trusted. Islanders were like that. Given any kind of choice, they always looked inward. (Quoted with the kind permission of the author).

Hurley is a leading figure in the British crime-writing scene, having written over 40 excellent novels. He has also worked extensively in television in the UK and Australia as a screenwriter, producer and director, and produced a regular column for the Portsmouth News for a number of years. Perhaps his most famous literary series is the DI Faraday novels, set in Portsmouth and providing rich, highly sympathetic, but unflinching evocations of the unusual island nature of the city and its inhabitants. Hurley is powerfully influenced by locations – from his childhood experiences of Clacton-on-Sea which fostered an abiding love of grungy seaside resorts, to the flatness and huge skies of moody East Anglian landscapes; from the kibbutzim of the Golan Heights, experienced while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, to the Falkland Islands where Hurley researched and filmed a series of retrospective ITV documentaries, In Time of War, exploring aspects of the 1982 conflict; and from Kerry and Donegal to the Galician coast landscapes that inspired his WWII series The Spoils of War. Hurley’s experience of the French Touraine region have inspired another series, the third novel of which Off Script appeared in 2020.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions about the map entries please contact the Map Director Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk