I’m a few days late to this particular Weekly Wednesday, but I couldn’t skip it because this week’s question is books set near where I live.

And I live near Exeter, in Devon, which means there is one extremely obvious place to begin.

🐕 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

There is something wonderfully appropriate about one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous cases taking Holmes and Watson out of London and dropping them onto Dartmoor. Because if you wanted to design a landscape specifically for a Gothic mystery, you could do a lot worse.

Dartmoor is beautiful, but it can also be bleak and wild and surprisingly eerie. The weather changes ridiculously quickly. Mist can roll in and swallow everything around you, and suddenly the landscape that looked perfectly pleasant a short while ago is giving you very strong perhaps we should not investigate that mysterious howling vibes.

And honestly, living nearby doesn’t diminish any of that atmosphere for me. If anything, it makes The Hound of the Baskervilles work more.

I know what Dartmoor can be like. I know how quickly the weather can turn, how the mist can come down and swallow the landscape, and how somewhere so beautiful and open can suddenly feel very wild and very isolated.

So when Conan Doyle sends Watson out onto the moor with strange noises in the distance and something possibly lurking out there in the darkness? I don’t have to work particularly hard to imagine it.

I’ve seen Dartmoor.

I believe in the hound.

Well. Metaphorically.

Probably.

🔎 Agatha Christie and the Devon coast

Christie was born in Torquay, so Devon is woven into her personal history as well as her fiction. The county and its coastline appear again and again in various forms, sometimes fictionalised and sometimes rather more recognisable.

And really, there’s something wonderfully Christie-ish about the Devon coast.

Beautiful scenery! Elegant hotels! Secluded coves! Sea views!

Murder.

Obviously.

It’s probably best not to examine too closely what crime fiction has done to Devon’s literary reputation.

🌿 Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Jane Austen gives us a rather different version of Devon.

After the Dashwood women have to leave Norland, they move to Barton Cottage, which Austen places in Devon. Barton itself is fictional, but I love getting this version of the county filled with cottages, country houses, walks, visits, gossip and complicated romantic entanglements.

It’s considerably less alarming than Conan Doyle’s Devon.

Nobody is being pursued across the moor by a gigantic spectral hound.

They just have to deal with Willoughby.

Arguably worse.

🏹 Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore

Then we can head north towards Exmoor for Lorna Doone, set around the Devon–Somerset border.

This is another one where the landscape feels hugely important to the story: the moors, valleys, farms and isolated communities are all tangled up in the romance and adventure. It’s wild and beautiful and occasionally dangerous – which, now that I think about it, is becoming something of a theme here.

Apparently fictional Devon exists on a sliding scale between beautiful pastoral countryside and something terrible is definitely lurking on that moor.

Fair enough.

✒️ And a little closer to home: Dame Hilary Mantel

This one is cheating slightly because it isn’t about a book set in Devon, but I can’t talk about books and this part of the world without mentioning Dame Hilary Mantel.

Mantel spent the later years of her life living in Budleigh Salterton, which gives me a much more personal connection because Budleigh is somewhere I used to go as a kid.

There’s something rather lovely – and slightly surreal – about knowing that the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy lived and wrote somewhere that belongs to my own childhood geography.

When you think of Mantel, your mind probably goes immediately to Tudor England, Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, rather than a seaside town in Devon.

But I think that’s one of the things I love about literary connections to home. They aren’t always about recognising the setting on the page. Sometimes they’re about discovering that extraordinary stories were being imagined and written in places that, to you, are wonderfully ordinary.

I think that’s what I enjoy most about books set near home.

When I’m reading about Narnia or Middle-earth, the landscape belongs largely to the imagination. But when a book takes me to Dartmoor, Exmoor or the Devon coast, I bring my own memories with me. I know something of what the air feels like, what the landscape looks like in different weather, and all those tiny details that don’t necessarily need to be explained.

The fictional version gets layered over the real one, and rather than making it less magical, somehow that makes it more vivid.

It’s familiar, but someone else has looked at it and found a story there.

Even if, judging by this particular selection of books, the story they found was quite often murder.

So if you need me, I’ll be here in Devon, enjoying the scenery, thinking about books and absolutely not investigating any mysterious howling noises coming from the direction of Dartmoor.

Sherlock Holmes can deal with those.

What about you? Are there books set near where you live? And does recognising the places make the story more vivid for you, or does it completely destroy the illusion?

Until next Wednesday – or, given my current relationship with the calendar, a few days afterwards… 😂