attempt to get away from his former life in the beautiful area around Little Sky, followed by Death in a Lonely Place and The Burial Place. Abell is absolutely delighted that there are more on the way. Away from books, he presents the breakfast show on Times Radio, a station he helped to launch in 2020. Before that he was a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row and was the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement.
Abell applied the Page 69 Test to The Burial Place with the following results:
I love this idea. There is a prize in France called Prix de la page 112, which follows the same principle (based apparently on a line from a Woody Allen film where a woman is compared to a poem on page 112 of an ee cummings collection).Follow Stig Abell on Instagram and Threads.
Anyway, to page 69 of The Burial Place! It's not a terrible place to start, as it happens: the book's first murder has, at that moment, just taken place in the Christie-esque location of an archaeological dig atop a beautiful, deserted Iron Age fort in the depths of the English countryside. We learn that the victim - a fussy local reverend, who had been party to the discovery of a treasure hoard - was found dying in a trench, having consumed some lethal liquid. It is not full of descriptive prose (which I am fond of), but there are little hints of the textures I enjoy writing about: the "bearish pelt" of my hirsute Scottish Inspector; the "sandpapery rasps" of the dig's director wringing her hands in distress.
Crime fiction is propelled - sadly and savagely - by murders, so this page is an important part of the forward momentum of the whole novel. It's a good "plot" page. It is also the last page of the chapter, so ends on what the Victorians called a "curtain line", a sentence that is designed to draws the reader ever onwards. Here it is:
"Thanks for securing the scene for us, Jake. It's a good job you did. Jordan died not long after he got to hospital, I'm sorry to say. Heart attack brought on by exposure to hydrochloric acid. There's a goodish chance he was murdered".
Murder and a mystery in a place of ancient history - it's what The Burial Place is about.
[I've checked page 112 for it's prize-winning potential, by the way, and it is only 6 lines long - another chapter ending. So I've done rather better with page 69, I reckon.]
Q&A with Stig Abell.
--Marshal Zeringue
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