Back to Mary Russell's World

The English Landscape

I was an Anglophile long before I started writing the Russell books, before I met my husband, even, who (although born in India) came complete with British passport and a house in Oxford.

It hardly seems fair that I get to count travel in England as work.

I suppose I ought to expand that to “travel in Great Britain,” since I occasionally venture to Wales, Scotland, and even Eire in the course of my visits. But as most of the books take place in the purely English countryside of Sussex, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Devon, let’s allow the “England” to stand.

We meet Russell on an apparently cloudless day in April, 1915. The guns may be laying down fire across the Channel in northern France, but on the Downs, the lambs skitter out of her way, the bees search for pollen, the air carries the odour of the nearby sea, and anything seems possible. Such as stepping on a rather moth-eaten looking beekeeper, who turns out to be a semi-retired consulting detective.

Links

For a peek at Holmes' and Russell’s neighbourhood in Sussex
Click for a map , description, activities, archaeology and historic sites of Sussex
And for a Bright history that will leave you flushed with pride
For the history of the country as a whole, don’t miss the Museum of London
For an overview of English history with pictures
This is where Mary spent a lot of time in Oxford and the city itself with a superb panorama of modern Oxford
For the maps of their travels, look to the Mary Russell / Sherlock Holmes Atlas