In anticipation of the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined anthology, to be published with Five Leaves Publishing in early 2025, in which a plethora of exceptional Lincolnshire authors give the county’s folk tales a fresh spin, we’re asking these authors to reflect on the project.

1. Please introduce yourself and your connection to Lincolnshire.

I’m a novelist, biographer and social history writer and I’ve lived in Barton-upon-Humber, North Lincolnshire since moving from London over 20 years ago. I’m the author of the DS Max Lomax novels, following a special Met Police unit that treads the path between policing and intelligence to tell stories of corruption and organised crime. The latest, The Last Days of Johnny Nunn (No Exit Press, October 2024) is set in south London in the year before the London Olympics. 

I’ve written about the northern Lincolnshire and the wider Humber region in a series of social history books, notably The Women They Left Behind and Distant Water. These told the story of the Grimsby fishing industry from the perspective of those who’d given their working and family lives to the sea. My 2017 biography of Ted Lewis, Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir was longlisted for the HRF Keating award and the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. Lewis’s novel, Jack’s Return Home, was adapted and directed by Mike Hodges as the genre-defining revenge thriller Get Carter in 1971. The novel’s climactic scenes take place at derelict brick kilns near the Humber, close to Barton, where Lewis and his childhood friends once played. 

2. How would you describe your writing style?

Primarily, I write crime / noir fiction. I try to make my stories work on several levels. I tend to work with a theme in mind, if not a detailed plan. Sometimes the meaning of a story isn’t apparent until I reread it later in the drafting process and there’s realisation that what I thought I was writing about was only a part of it. 

There’s rich potential within genre fiction and with noir in particular to shine a light on contemporary issues – the idea that writing crime is about the lie society tells us and the lies we tell ourselves. That said, characters and story come first, which is why I was keen to work on layering the folkloric element to a contemporary tale with The River Rat – something I haven’t done before.

3. Could you talk a little about the folk tale you worked with for the anthology: why did you choose it and how did you adapt it?

Reading the tale of the Read’s Island Werewolf for the first time, I thought there was scope for adaptation and development. In other words, there isn’t so much detail to unpick, but the key story beats are in place. The River Rat uses the island’s bleakness and remoteness, imagining it as the kind of place where dark deeds go unnoticed. From the original story, I kept the location and its isolation. The werewolf has to stay, but I’ve played with the idea of him as a ferryman. I use the fact that he’s a traveller. In the eyes of the local populace, that renders him untrustworthy. And of course, it all leads to a dark and horrific discovery.

The story references the Humber as a working river and makes use of the psychogeography of key locations. That feeling of an ongoing conversation with the past is inescapable. The river often feels like a haunted place. 

Somebody once told me that, before the Humber Bridge opened in 1981, there were a dozen historically significant families in Barton and most people living here could trace their ancestry to one of them. They may have been exaggerating, but the prospect of an age-old feud between families fought out in the present day was too tempting to refuse. 

Read’s Island, the Humber foreshore, and its abandoned industrial works are vivid and evocative locations. Add the heightened senses and cunning of the wolfman and it’s an ideal setting for an outsider story of revenge, betrayal, power, and smalltown corruption.

4. If you could ask any author, living or dead, to adapt any piece of Lincolnshire folklore, as you have done with Read’s Island Werewolf, whose adaptation would you most like to read and why?

Tina Jackson, a wonderful writer whose novels The Beloved Children and Spirit Burns are entirely of that world where the strange and otherworldly filters through the veil to our realm. Circus bears, mysterious crones, dancing girls and spirit wraiths together in the grimy backstreets of the industrial north and the music hall stage. I’d love to read Tina’s take on a tale like Fan o’ the Fens or The Black Lady of Bradley Woods.

5. Haslet is one of Lincolnshire’s delicacies, a kind of meatloaf with herbs, often made out of pork. Despite the similarity in names, it is far more obscure than its cousin, the Haggis. If the Haslet was a mythical creature, like the Wild Haggis, what kind of creature would it be?

We know they’re quite small, furry creatures, a bit catlike, a bit rabbity. Sharp teeth and can be fierce. They’re elusive, rarely seen during daylight. I was told they could be enticed into the open with a trail of plum-bread crumbs, though that didn’t work for me. But there is a particular stand of trees near the chalk stream that runs through Hubbard’s Hills, just outside of Louth, where, if you settle quietly for a while and read the opening stanzas to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, they may emerge from the undergrowth. On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye, / That clothe the wold and meet the sky; / And thro’ the field the road runs by / To many-tower’d Camelot; …

Oh, and they like cheese. Gouda, preferably with cumin.