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WORK TITLE: The Magpie Tree
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://katherinestansfield.blogspot.co.uk/
CITY: Bodmin Moor
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2013100636
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2013100636
HEADING: Stansfield, Katherine, 1983-
000 00888nz a2200217n 450
001 9362927
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008 130917n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2013100636
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca09569981
040 __ |a WlAbNL |b eng |e rda |c WlAbNL
046 __ |f 1983
100 1_ |a Stansfield, Katherine, |d 1983-
370 __ |c England |e Bodmin Moor, England |f Aberystwyth, Wales
372 __ |a English literature-Study and teaching |a Creative writing |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Aberystwyth University. Department of English & Creative Writing
374 __ |a College teachers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a The Visitor, 2013: |b t.p. (Katherine Stansfield) jkt. (grew up on Bodmin Moor ; she is a lecturer in the department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University)
670 __ |a Parthian WWW site, viewed 6 Sep. 2013 |b (Katherine Stansfield ; b. in 1983)
PERSONAL
Born 1983, in England.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Open University and the School of Continuing and Professional Education at Cardiff University, Wales, teacher. Literature Wales, mentor. University of South Wales, writing fellow. Cardiff University, Royal Literary Fund fellow. Cornerstone in Cardiff, poet in residence.
MEMBER:Crime Cymru, member; Crime Writers Association, member.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Katherine Stansfield is a Wales-based writer. She grew up on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Stansfield teaches at the Open University and the School of Continuing and Professional Education at Cardiff University. She is a mentor for Literature Wales and is a writing fellow at the University of South Wales. She is also the Royal Literary Fund fellow at Cardiff University and the Poet in Residence at Cornerstone in Cardiff.
Stansfield is a member of the Crime Writers Association and of Crime Cymru, a collective of crime writers who have a connection to Wales. She lives in Cardiff in Wales.
Falling Creatures
Falling Creatures takes place in Bodmin Moor, a rugged land of deadly bogs and superstitious people. In 1844, Shilly, a young woman who was sold as labor by her father, finds herself working as a maid in this peculiar land. She befriends Charlotte Dymond, a charming and charismatic young woman with a store of secret talents, at the hiring fair where she was purchased. Shilly knows immediately that the two have a special bond, and as they adjust to their new lives in Bodmin Moor, Shilly begins to fall in love.
On Penhale Farm, where the women work for brusque Mrs. Peter, Charlotte shares her secret knowledge with Shilly. Seemingly capable of magic and spells, Charlotte can cause suffering or joy to whomever she pleases. As Shilly’s love for Charlotte grows, she sees that she is not the only one who has their eye on the young woman. Nor is she the only one who is devastated when Charlotte shows up dead. All the townsfolk point their fingers at Matthew Weeks, a fellow farmworker at Penhale, but Shilly is not so sure. The evidence is weak, the investigation botched, and it seems that the case is based mostly on gossip and personal grudges. Shilly begins her own investigation, and is joined by a mysterious Mr. Williams, who shares Shilly’s doubts.
A contributor to Historical Novel Society website described Falling Creatures as “a masterful, mesmerizing and haunting mystery full of gothic atmosphere and hints of the strange and supernatural,” while John Cleal in Crime Review website described it as “a genuinely gripping and informed piece of historical thriller writing.”
The Magpie Tree
The Magpie Tree, the second in the “Cornish Mystery” series, picks up soon after Falling Creatures ends. Anna Drake is practical and smart. She wants to start her own detective agency, so she is pleased when Sir Vivian Orton approaches her with a case. A boy vanished in the woods of Trethevy on the North Cornish coast, and Orton believes a duo of wood-dwelling witches are the culprits. Orton offers Anna thirty pounds sterling if she can prove the witches kidnapped the boy, just the amount she needs to open her detective agency.
Anna convinces Shilly, her investigative partner, to take up the case with her. While Anna is practical and fact-driven, Shilly is moved by a more internal compass, at times even experiencing informative visions. Though Shilly is weary of mysterious tragedies, she agrees to help. The investigation takes the two women into the woods of Trethevy, where they meet the accused witches. The “witches” are two German women who claim to be in the woods on vacation. While the women may not have magical powers, both Shilly and Anna come to believe there is some sort of dark magic in the old forest, and they must uncover sins of the past if they hope to uncover the mystery of the vanishing boy.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “Stansfield gives a haunting evocation of a place and time when superstition and logic coexisted in uneasy alliance, and challenges the reader to decide which was more real.” A contributor to What Cathy Read Next website described the book as “atmospheric, intriguing, mysterious.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 23, 2018, review of The Magpie Tree, p. 66.
ONLINE
Crime Review, http://crimereview.co.uk/ (October 14, 2017), John Cleal, review of Falling Creatures.
Historical Novel Society, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (August 30, 2018), review of Falling Creatures.
What Cathy Read Next, https://whatcathyreadnext.wordpress.com/ (May 21, 2018), review of The Magpie Tree.
Katherine Stansfield grew up on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff.
Her new novel, The Magpie Tree, second in the Cornish Mysteries series is out now with Allison & Busby. It's the sequel to Falling Creatures.
Her debut, The Visitor, was published by Parthian in 2013. It went on to win the fiction prize at the 2014 Holyer an Gof awards.
Playing House, a poetry collection, was published by Seren in 2014. It includes 'Canada', Poem of the Week in The Guardian online.
Her second collection, We Could Be Anywhere By Now, was supported by a writer's bursary from Literature Wales and will be out with Seren in early 2020.
She teaches for the Open University and the School of Continuing and Professional Education at Cardiff University. She works as a mentor for Literature Wales, a Writing Fellow at the University of South Wales, and is the Royal Literary Fund fellow at Cardiff University. She is also the new Poet in Residence at Cornerstone in Cardiff.
Katherine is a member of Crime Cymru: a new collective of crime writers with a connection to Wales. You can read more about the group here. She is also a member of the Crime Writers Association.
Unless otherwise stated, the author photos on this site were taken by Keith Morris and are owned by Katherine. You're very welcome to use them but please credit Keith wherever possible.
Print Marked Items
The Magpie Tree
Publishers Weekly.
265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Magpie Tree
Katherine Stansfield. Allison & Busby, $19.95
(288p) ISBN 978-0-74-902171-9
Set in 1844, Stansfield's atmospheric second Cornish Mystery (after Falling Creatures) introduces practical, scientifically inclined Anna Drake,
who wants to start her own detective agency. Anna is delighted when Sir Vivian Orton offers her 30 [pounds sterling] to prove that a missing
village boy was snatched by two witches who have taken up residence in an old summer house in the woods. But Anna learns quickly that logic
doesn't always apply in rural Cornwall. Fortunately, her partner, Shilly, is a native who knows the mysterious ways of her people down in her
bones. The "witches" protest that they are only German travelers on a drawing holiday. Yet Shilly sees that the woods are indeed bewitched, and
the canny magpies roosting in the tree that grows by St. Nectan's well may be the key to what has happened to the missing child. Stansfield gives
a haunting evocation of a place and time when superstition and logic coexisted in uneasy alliance, and challenges the reader to decide which was
more real. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Magpie Tree." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532889/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4c686e4e. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532889
Book Review: The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield
Posted on May 21, 2018 by whatcathyreadnext
The Magpie Tree CoverAbout the Book
Jamaica Inn, 1844: the talk is of witches. A boy has vanished in the woods of Trethevy on the North Cornish coast, and a reward is offered for his return.
Shilly has had enough of such dark doings, but her new companion, the woman who calls herself Anna Drake, insists they investigate. Anna wants to open a detective agency, and the reward would fund it. They soon learn of a mysterious pair of strangers who have likely taken the boy, and of Saint Nectan who, legend has it, kept safe the people of the woods. As Shilly and Anna seek the missing child, the case takes another turn – murder.
Something is stirring in the woods and old sins have come home to roost.
Format: Hardcover, ebook (320 pp.) Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 22nd March 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery
Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops) *links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme
Find The Magpie Tree on Goodreads
My Review
The book’s compelling opening line, ‘The day I went to Jamaica Inn was the day I saw a man hanged’, brought to mind Daphne du Maurier and the opening lines of her novel, My Cousin Rachel: ‘They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.’ Indeed, in the first paragraphs of the book, the author inserts plenty of enticing nuggets of information and clues about what may have occurred in the previous book in the series, Falling Creatures. As a reader, I was at once intrigued and curious to learn more about the characters I was meeting and what their experiences had been up until now.
And what interesting characters are our two protagonists: Shilly, and the woman who calls herself Anna. There are hints of some sort of tragedy in Shilly’s past, which in part explains her weakness for alcohol to try to keep the demons at bay. Shilly is sensitive to those forces that can’t be explained by science, seeing visions that at times provide valuable information. Or perhaps they’re nothing more than the manifestations of over-indulgence. Anna is the complete opposite – although they do say opposites attract, don’t they? She’s practical, preferring factual explanations for seemingly strange events over belief in superstition or magic. Shilly recognises this difference between them: ‘On the moor, in the woods, wherever we were in Cornwall, there were things she couldn’t make sense of. Things she needed me for.’ However, just like Shilly, there are elements of Anna’s previous life that are a mystery also. Together Anna and Shilly make an unconventional and engaging crime detecting partnership. However, it’s a partnership in which Anna definitely wears the trousers (and often not just metaphorically).
Shilly and Anna learn of the reward being offered by landowner, Sir Vivian Orton for information about a missing local boy and, since they are in need of funds and Anna is keen to further her ambition of becoming a detective, they travel to Trethevy to begin their investigation. Suspicion has fallen on two women new to the area, ‘furriners’ believed by the locals to be involved in witchcraft and to have spirited the boy away. I’m not going to say anything more about the plot but leave you to discover it for yourself. However, eventually Shilly and Anna do uncover the solution to the mystery but not before sins of the past have been revealed and a kind of retribution has taken place.
There is some gorgeously sensual writing and I also loved the inclusion of fragments of Cornish dialect. The author injects an air of mystery and the supernatural into the story that provides an extra dimension. For example, the spooky magpie tree of the title, considered by some of the locals to be sacred, that has shades of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’. There is also a sense of the forces of nature at work, such as the forest that seems to shift in order to help, hinder, confuse, hide or reveal. The book also engages with the notion of difference, with the two women suspected of involvement in the disappearance being regarded with suspicion and becoming convenient scapegoats largely because they are ‘furriners’.
I loved The Magpie Tree. It ticked all the boxes for me as a historical mystery: intriguing story line, interesting and engaging central characters, great period detail and atmospheric location. Immediately I turned the final page, I added the previous book in the series, Falling Creatures, to my wish-list and I’ll be eagerly awaiting news of the next book in the series. Click here to read Katherine’s guest post, ‘Sequels: looking back or looking forward?’ published on my blog recently.
The Magpie TreeI received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Allison & Busby, in return for an honest and unbiased review. (Can I just say that, as far as I’m concerned, Allison & Busby are hitting it out of the park when it comes to my kind of historical fiction novel lately.)
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In three words: Atmospheric, intriguing, mysterious
Try something similar…The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin (click here to read my review)
Falling Creatures
BY KATHERINE STANSFIELD
Find & buy on
When Shilly is taken to the hiring fair at All Drunkard and signed away by her father, she never expects to find love, but once she meets Charlotte Dymond she knows they have a special bond. Hired together by the gruff Mrs. Peter, they travel to Penhale Farm, where Shilly follows besotted in Charlotte’s footsteps as Charlotte teaches her about magic and superstition. Charlotte seems to attract attention wherever she goes and has a number of admirers in the locality, so Shilly can’t be sure who is the lucky recipient of Charlotte’s affection, but when Charlotte is found dead in suspicious circumstances, the locals have only one suspect in mind: Matthew Weeks, another hired hand on the farm. Shilly, however is not convinced and along with a newspaperman from London, a Mr. Williams, she is determined to find answers. It seems that at every turn they are met by lies and deception in this windswept lonely corner of Cornwall, and everyone has secrets including Mr. Williams and Shilly herself.
This is a masterful, mesmerising and haunting mystery full of gothic atmosphere and hints of the strange and supernatural. Based on a real murder mystery from the mid-19th century, Falling Creatures is a clever, heartfelt and very well-written story with a powerful narrative voice ideal for anyone who enjoyed Sophia Tobin’s The Vanishing, Andrew Hughes The Coroner’s Daughter and Anna Mazzola’s The Unseeing.
Publisher Allison & Busby
Date Published 23 March 2017
ISBN-10 0749021411
ISBN-13 978-0749021412
Format hardcover
Pages 350
Price £ 14.99
Falling Creatures
by Katherine Stansfield
Country girl Shilly finds love with the strangely gifted Charlotte Dymond on an isolated Cornish farm. When Charlotte is murdered she sets out to find the truth.
Review
Generations of writers have used the rugged and inhospitable Bodmin Moor, with its isolated villages, insular and superstitious people, craggy tors, deadly bogs and air of brooding menace as a setting for Gothic thrillers. It’s a place where anything could happen. And no one knows that better than Katherine Stansfield, who grew up in the shadow of Roughtor. She has drawn on a true story from the moor’s grim history to produce a chilling and compelling melange of superstition, witchcraft, lesbian love, alcoholism, murder and detection.
In 1844, farm labourer Matthew Weeks was hung for the savage killing of Charlotte Dymond at Penhale Farm. The brutal killing was so sensational it attracted attention even from London papers – at a time when it was easier to travel to France than Cornwall.
Many court transcripts and both local and national press reports are still available and the case stirred so much interest it still sparks books as well as local comment. It is unlikely under current law that Weeks would have been convicted. Much of the evidence against him was, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory. From an amateurish and botched investigation by local constables to a magistrates’ committal actually naming him as the killer, it was inspired by gossip, jealousy, superstition, hatred and prejudicial attitudes to those considered social inferiors.
Stansfield quotes extensively from these documents to support a brutal picture of the isolated moor-dwellers – a society where smuggling, drunkenness and sexual perversions of all kinds were almost a relief from the grimness of everyday life.
On a lonely moorland farm, maid-of-all-work Charlotte, known by her nickname of Shilly for her shilly-shallying behaviour, finds love in the arms of her fellow worker Charlotte Dymond. But her new friend has many secrets and apparently possesses witching powers that can cause both good and evil. When she is murdered, Shilly cannot believe Weeks capable of the crime and pledges Charlotte’s ‘fetch’ or ghost to bring whoever is responsible to justice.
With her search floundering, but her conviction undimmed, she is befriended by an educated stranger calling himself Mr Williams who also has doubts over the case, seeking Shilly’s help while offering his own views.
But in a world a dark secrets, half truths and lies, Williams has secrets too. The barely educated country girl, who relies completely on her sense of what is right and wrong, is thrown into a bewildering world of modern deductive detection as their joint – and often troubled – investigation builds to shattering conclusion.
It seems unfair to talk about weakness in this often horrifying and truly engrossing story, but the ending is left rather hanging in the air. With a sequel due next year, it won’t be long before the next stage of the relationship between Shilly and Williams is revealed.
Falling Creatures is a great read. It’s clever, more than plausible and its sheer pace and emotional power will appeal not just to devotees of the Gothic but also to anyone who wants a genuinely gripping and informed piece of historical thriller writing.
Reviewed 14 October 2017 by John Cleal
John Cleal is a former soldier and journalist with an interest in medieval history.