07/07/2025
Anthony Hontoir spent most of his working life in film production, and has been a cameraman and producer since 1988, but before that, he worked as a freelance journalist for nine years and has written seven books on woodwork. Devon has invariably been his family's destination for holidays, so he has grown very familiar with the countryside, towns and villages of South Devon in particular, with Totnes being one of his favourite destinations. The 2013 summer holiday was spent staying in a cottage near to the tidal road at Aveton Gifford to the west of Kingsbridge. One fine sunny morning, Anthony saw a young woman riding her horse along the river, because the roadway was flooded, allowing the horse to stop nearby to have a drink from the river.
Bringing all of these factors together, and with a liking for whodunit novels, he saw the possibility of a plot for a murder mystery, although film work put it to the back of his mind for a while. In 2015, he eventually began work on writing "The Tidal Road Mystery", introducing the world to Erwin Graham, his amateur sleuth, a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter who has taken early retirement from journalism and escaped from London to the town of Totnes, where he has become an impecunious artist, blending in with the counter-culture for which the town is known.
Along comes Godfrey Sanderson, a newly-retired cameraman, who moves to the fictitious village of Watersford and discovers that it has its own tidal road. On his first morning in the village, he meets a young woman on horseback and events quickly catapult him into a situation where he becomes the main suspect in a murder. He seeks the help of Erwin Graham, who has now settled in Watersford to become one of Godfrey's close neighbours - and at this point in the writing of it, inspiration truly struck, because Anthony decided to introduce a third main character into the story in the form of Erwin's partner, Belle, a gipsy. As one reader has noted, Belle steals the show.
Anthony's film production company, Downwood Films, had already established a small book publishing offshoot, and he took the decision to use Downwood Books to publish "The Tidal Road Mystery" in 2016. The novel came out in paperback, and sales quickly necessitated a second print-run. A number of readers asked if there was going to be a second book to follow it, and this presented Anthony with an intriguing dilemma: could he run film-making with novel-writing, or should the former cease in order to favour the latter? In truth, the problem solved itself, for it was becoming increasingly difficult to produce commercially-successful independent documentary films, and retirement was clearly beckoning. What better answer could there be, than to concentrate instead on writing whodunit novels?
"The Seagull Bay Mystery" was destined to become the second book in the Erwin Graham series, although it began life with a completely different plot from the one it has ended up with. After writing the first half a dozen chapters of the original version, events conspired to suggest that an alternative plot was needed, and the story now revolves around the sudden and seemingly inexplicable disappearance of a female doctor, who vanishes one day at the end of surgery hours. Once again, Erwin, Belle and Godfrey set out to solve the case, with Erwin in charge of the investigation. Whilst these books emulate the style of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which had its heyday almost a hundred years ago with stories that reflected that period in society, they certainly hark back to that era, but in a contemporary setting, so the reader enters the author's world, with characters who can converse in language that does not include coarse vulgarities, and free from the graphic content that so many modern books seem to include.
Furthermore, there is no wish to make Erwin Graham a perfect amateur sleuth, but one who simply thinks he is, although he always gets the right answer in the end. Instead, the reader should see him as a man who can bring his undoubted experience of crime to bear, from his journalistic days, and has a very good analytical mind, but is still capable of making errors of judgment, whilst adamantly refusing to admit it. And, of course, there must be a police presence, in the form of Superintendent Howarth and his ever-reliable and somewhat stolid assistant, Detective Sergeant Hoskins.
So these are characters who have been taken from a previous era and pitched headlong into the recent past, to give the reader something different that has a touch of nostalgia to it. The author has a liking for the values of old Britain, and somehow the modern world is kept at arm's length. Forget about technology, because it's not there. Erwin does not own a mobile phone, he and Belle live a simple life in a broken-down bungalow and Belle, with her gipsy background, has her own way of viewing the world. These books are written to be enjoyed for what they are, set in a society that hardly exists any longer.
If you already enjoy these books, write to the publishers or the author to let them know, or get in touch through Facebook, especially if you wish there to be further books in the Erwin Graham series. Perhaps, one day, there will be an Erwin Graham Club.
