Tenby Author Claire Back on Her Debut Crime Novel A Deadly Summer

Few authors are often told to write what they know, and in the case of first-time crime writer Claire Back it has proved a recipe for success. Claire’s debut novel A Deadly Summer is set in the fictional seaside town of Penroth, but the broader landscape of the story is very much the south Pembrokeshire of her youth. “I was born and raised in Tenby,” said Claire, “and while Penroth is most definitely not Tenby, the wider setting is true to the real Pembrokeshire I grew up in.” A Deadly Summer adopts a dual-timeline narrative as readers follow Detective Sergeant Nia Tremeyrick in her quest to identify mummified remains discovered in an abandoned hotel during the summer of 2015. Tremeyrick’s investigation leads her back to the summer of 1984 when teenager Cerys Pritchard is persuaded to attend an illicit party.

The book seamlessly follows the twin narratives of Tremeyrick’s 2015 investigation and the gruesome events of more than three decades earlier. “Obviously, A Deadly Summer is in no way autobiographical, but I wanted to write about something I knew, and I knew exactly what it was like to grow up in a Pembrokeshire seaside town in the 1980s so I decided to weave a murder-mystery into that world – 1984 was the year I sat my A-levels.” The south Pembrokeshire coast is certainly a world Claire knows well. Her grandparents on one side were farmers from Castlemartin and on the other she comes from a long line of Tenby fishermen. Her wider family all now live in Tenby and Saundersfoot. After completely those A-levels in the hot summer of 1984, she went to study in Cardiff and then embarked on a career in banking and finance, ultimately settling in Wrexham where she and husband Jonathan raised three, now adult, children. When the time was right, she returned to the world of work and retrained as an early years teaching assistant and also worked as an exam assistant for children with special educational needs, all while harbouring a burning ambition to write. “I have always been a bit of a frustrated writer,” she said. “I’m an avid reader – especially of crime fiction – and have been a member of book club, reading a novel a week, for more than 20 years.

with them and also the possibility of a teenage girl going missing for all that time and not being missed.” Claire actually began working on a novel set amid the preparations for D-Day during World War Two but soon realised that she was spending far more time researching than she was writing. “I decided to park that idea for a later date and return to the world I knew,” she said. That world was, of course, seaside Pembrokeshire in the 1980s. “We lived in a guesthouse – well, my mum ran one guesthouse, and my aunt ran another next door. They were converted multi-room Victorian townhouses and so there was a non-stop influx of strangers constantly moving through our lives. There were some very strange characters, but it all seemed completely normal to us.

Writing a Pembrokeshire murder mystery

“and while Penroth is most definitely not Tenby, the wider setting is true to the real Pembrokeshire I grew up in.”

“Looking back, it was a very strange existence, and I wanted to bring that world into the novel. That was why I knew I had to set I was intrigued by this idea of someone believing that they had got away with murder for 30 years only for the past to start catching up with them.

“Crime fiction has always been my genre and while out dog-walking – I have two spaniels – I started plotting a few stories. “I was intrigued by this idea of someone believing that they had got away with murder for 30 years only for the past to start catching up the original incident that drives A Deadly Summer during that time.” The decision to place Nia Tremeyrick’s investigation in 2015 sprang from Claire’s love of traditional detective stories rather than the more contemporary genre of the gritty police procedural. “I have always loved crime novels with real clues that the reader could try to solve,” she said. “I’m very much of the analogue world so it appealed to me to set the investigation in a time before there were CCTV cameras everywhere, before Automatic Number Plate Recognition and mobile phone tracking. I wanted this to be a murder-mystery in the traditional sense. “I also really wanted to place Nia and her investigation in a pre-Covid world.” “Nia is definitely not a version of me,” Claire said, laughing at the suggestion.

“She is extremely disillusioned with her life. She has only just become a detective after years in uniform and the promotion has definitely not been as fulfilling as she expected. To make matters worse, it has left her personal life in turmoil. “When she sets out on this investigation she sees it only as a potential career move. She just wants to solve the case to make a name for herself within the police, but as she digs deeper, the case she hoped would make her career turns into a nightmare.” As she attempts to piece together the past while battling her own personal struggles, Nia comes to realise that there’s no such thing as perfect justice. Releasing a new novel is a nerve-wracking time for any writer, particularly a first-time novelist, but early reviews of A Deadly Summer have been nothing short of glowing, with some reviewers comparing it to the likes of hit TV shows Broadchurch and Unforgotten.

A wider perspective

Without Good Reason author Colette Lewis described A Deadly Summer as “A gripping whodunnit with an unexpected twist” while Caroline Corcoran, author of Tiny Daggers, called it ‘accomplished and tight, with pacing and narrative that reads like someone’s tenth novel, not their first,” adding “the detail is immaculate and the writing is beautiful.”

“I’ve been absolutely blown away by the reviews,” said Claire. “Everyone who has read it has been incredibly kind. To be compared to the likes of Broadchurch and Unforgotten is beyond anything I imagined when I was writing it. “I am very proud of the book. I really believe in it. Seeing it in a bookshop is something I have dreamt about for so long so to actually see it is going to be incredible. “I hope readers will find it a great summer read, something to enjoy on the beach or on the plane.” A Deadly Summer is most definitely perfect reading for those spending their summer in West Wales. A Deadly Summer by Claire Back is published by Cranthorpe Millner and will be available in all good booksellers and online from June 30.