The Body On The Doorstep.

A Romney Marsh Mystery which quite literally is what it says on the tin, so to speak. Its a historical, a murder mystery set in 1790, Kent, The Romney Marsh. Late one blustery windy night, hard drinking and world weary, Reverend Hardcastle is shook from a deep sleep (..drunken port induced fugue..) by the arrival at his front door and door step of a young man who is promptly murdered. As he lays dying he whispers a cryptic message into Hardcastle's ear, who is almost done away with himself seconds later. Hardcastle is deeply shaken up by this event, shaken up in every sense of the expression. It stirs him from the self induce fog of drunkeness and he sets out to discover the mystery of the body on the doorstep. In doing so he sets in motion a series of events that opens a doorway into the shadowy world of smugglers, corrupt officials and the excise men who pursue them.
             Saint Mary In The Marsh is a great location for this story. Think Henry Fielding, think Doctor Syn and his band of night riders, think misty marshlands by moonlight, with the eerie sound of the wind stirring the skeletal branches of trees framing a smuggler's moon. the little hamlet is filled with interesting and well rounded characters. With the Reverend Hardcastle being the strongest. He is well liked but equally written off as an old duffer with an over fondness for brandy and port, legal or nay. In that small coastal town the inhabitants making their living from the sea, it is the primary source of sustenance and all they own they derive from it. It is also the source of their greatest dread; invasion by the French.
             Its a tough old life in Saint Mary's In The Marsh. There is hard work for little pay with side helpings of bribery, murder, secrets which threaten violence at every turn, and the unseen but always present gang of ruthless smugglers The Twelve Apostles. To those looking in from outside or afar the village of Saint Mary In The Marsh is little more than a wretched hive of scum and villany.
             I, for one, cannot wait to go back there.