At the start of the pandemic, masks weren’t worn much in England but people wore gloves and disinfected their shopping before bringing it into the house. I’d made a point of writing every day during March and April 2020, even noting the changing state of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hair.

I’ve kept a diary since I was eleven and, during the writing process, I was very grateful for it.

The Locked Room was written in 20, which already seemed a lifetime away. It has often been noted that lockdown did very strange things to our collective memory. The Locked Room has some light-hearted moments – for example, Ruth’s lockdown shopping list starts ‘Cat Food, Wine’ – but there is darkness too. I wanted to explore this shared experience and also to highlight the plight of people for whom home was not a safe place. But, when lockdown started in March 2020, the whole country became one big locked room. In this book, Nelson is investigating a series of apparent suicides, including one in a room locked from the inside. All crime writers are obsessed with locked room mysteries, so-called impossible murders where a body is found in a completely inaccessible place. At the start of The Locked Room, Nelson is scoffing at the thought of hand sanitiser and Cathbad is putting a circle of protection around his cottage.Īll the sounds very high minded but I have to admit that an evil, writery part of my mind thought: what a great opportunity. Also I thought that readers might want to know what happened to the characters in lockdown.

I thought that, looking back at the series, I would regret not mentioning the most devastating world crisis of my lifetime. Some real-life events, like Brexit and Donald Trump becoming US President, had already infiltrated Ruth’s world. Having written a book about Ruth every year for fourteen years, it somehow seemed wrong to miss out 2020. In the end I decided to cover lockdown and the pandemic. Should I pretend that Covid-19 had never happened and let Ruth and Nelson get on with their everyday, albeit complicated, lives? Should I set the novel in the future? Surely Covid would be over by, say, 2022? Should I cram all the events into January and February and leave the virus as a dark cloud on the horizon? The previous book, The Night Hawks, ended in December 2019 so I knew that in the next instalment I had to face the problem of 2020.

I thought about this when planning my fourteenth Ruth Galloway novel.

The locked room ruth galloway