Some of the action of Pauline Rowson’s fifteenth DI Andy Horton novel, The Luccombe Bay Murders is focused at the Sailing Club, Tipner. Horton returns to Portsmouth CID after a tedious computer course in London to find there has been a series of highway robberies in his absence and an arson attack at the sailing club where the Chief Constable keeps his boat. What’s more the Chief’s boat is one of three that have been set alight and he’s demanding action. As the case becomes connected the discovery of a dead man on the Isle of Wight Horton uncovers some startling revelations into his own mother’s past and the truth behind her disappearance three decades earlier. The following extract is quoted with the kind permission of the author:
Horton placed his motorbike helmet on the floor behind his desk and lifted the receiver. It was DC Mark Leonard of the Arson Task Force with the news that there had been a fire at the sailing club at Tipner.
“Not the building, but three boats have been destroyed in the yard,” Leonard announced.
Horton knew the club well. They’d had a murder investigation close by it last June, when a woman’s body had been found on a sunken barge off the old quayside. The club and its quay were on the western shores of Portsmouth, just north of the international port and naval base. Gaye Clayton, the forensic pathologist, kept her sailing dinghy there. Horton hoped hers wasn’t one of the three boats that had been torched. He asked if Leonard knew whose boats had been destroyed.
“That’s the reason I’m calling you. The club secretary, Richard Bolton’s here, and has just broken the bad news to me,” Leonard replied. “One of the boats belongs to a retired dentist by the name of Venda Atkinson, the second to Councillor Dominic Levy.”
“Head of the police committee.”
“The same.”
“Not good. Levy’s opinion of us isn’t high at the best of times. He’s bound to start jumping up and down, bellowing for results.”
“Then he’ll have company because the third dinghy belongs to the Chief Constable.”
Horton emitted a groan.
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 The Langstone Harbour Murders and The Farlington Marsh 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.
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