A key location in Shroud of Evil by Pauline Rowson is Admiralty Tower, Queen Street. DI Horton is assigned the case of a missing person, the P.I., Jasper Kenton. Kenton’s formidable business partner, Eunice Swallows, seems unwilling to give Horton any useful information, and Horton – irritated at being assigned such a low-ranking investigation – suspects the disappearance has a mundane explanation, but when Kenton’s car turns up, and a shocking discovery is made, Horton finds himself embroiled in an investigation with major personal ramifications, in which the necessity to withhold key information may end his career. The following extract is quoted with the kind permission of the author:

Horton crossed to the window and pulled back the blinds. He was looking down on the main road, which ran towards The Hard on his right, southwards, and to the centre of the city on his left, northwards. The apartment didn’t have a sea view; instead it overlooked the Royal Maritime Club on the corner of a road of council houses and maisonettes built during the 1950s when no property developer or councillor had envisaged the area becoming a tourist attraction. Then, the dockyard on his right hadn’t been labelled ‘historic’ and neither had it housed attractions that now drew thousands of visitors from all around the world. Instead it had been the city’s major employer, with thousands of workers, and had attracted navies from around the globe.

He had a good view across the city to the east, including that of the giant tower blocks that graced the skyline. The nearest one had been his home until his mother had disappeared. He couldn’t remember being afraid of any of his neighbours or any of the children who lived there. In fact he’d played with the kids in the broken-down playground beneath their twenty-third-floor flat – the second they’d inhabited in that block of flats, he’d since learned, though he had no idea why they’d moved from the seventeenth floor to the top floor. Perhaps it was more spacious or there had been problems with the flat on the seventeenth floor.

There had been scuffles with the other kids but nothing any boy didn’t usually get up to and nothing like the fights he’d endured after being moved from there to this area, and the battles he’d fought at school. He’d learned the hard way to take care of himself. He’d come across a couple of those kids he’d fought with during his police career. Some had grown up to become violent criminals and he’d taken great pleasure in seeing them banged up.

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 – fifteen featuring the rugged and flawed Portsmouth based detective, Inspector Andy Horton; three 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 [A Deadly Wake] and Death in the Harbour (both 2020). 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. Her website includes a handy map that shows the various Hampshire and Isle of Wight locations of her novels.

If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about the Portsmouth Literary Map, please email me: mark.frost@port.ac.uk