Glenda Young on her latest Scarborough cosy crime Music to Die For at the Seaview Hotel
Glenda Young considers Scarborough her “happy place”.
The Sunderland-based author says it is where her parents took the family on holiday as children for more than 10 years during ‘Shipyard Fortnight’, when workers in the north-east would down tools.
"Same bed and breakfast, same two weeks in the middle of August,” she says.
Glenda and husband Barry Smith were even married at the town’s renowned Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2011.
None of that stopped her from setting murder mysteries in the resort.
Music to Die For at the Seaview Hotel, released this month and coming out again in paperback in December, is the fifth in her ‘cosy crime’ series all set in the Yorkshire Coast town.
This edition is about fictional 80s pop band The A64, which reunites for the gig of a lifetime at Scarborough’s Open Air Theatre – until one member ends up dead when old tensions resurface in the band.
“I was contracted to write historical sagas set in the north-east for Headline (Publishing) and then lockdown hit, and I couldn't leave the house. So it was during COVID that I turned to crime,” says Glenda, 62.
"I had an idea for a comedy novel, something that would cheer me up during lockdown, and it would star 12 Elvis impersonators called Twelvis.”
She added a crime element at her agent’s recommendation and that book – Murder at the Seaview Hotel – was the first of the cosy crimes and the reader’s introduction to sleuth Helen Dexter.
Glenda credits the library in the village of Ryhope, where she grew up, for giving her a love of books. She left school at 15, went into the world of work straight away, and “always kept the writing almost a secret – it was something I did in private because. I just assumed it would be no good. It was kind of that way until about 12 years ago,” she says.
In her mid-30s, she did a journalism course with a creative writing module, and for that set up a Coronation Street fan website. It led to a placement in the press office at ITV promoting the soap. After the death of Anne Kirkbride died, who played the character of Deirdre Barlow, ITV asked Glenda the official tribute book. This changed Glenda’s life, as she stepped down from her job as a secretary at the University of Sunderland – a role she loved – and took up the opportunity in 2015, then started to write fiction.
Glenda was signed by Headline in 2016. As well as 12 historical sagas and her cosy crime series, she writes a weekly soap opera, Riverside, for The People's Friend magazine.
The Helen Dexter cosy crime novels were shortlisted – alongside eventual winner Richard Osman for his Thursday Murder Club capers – for Best New Crime Series at the Dead Good Reader Awards during the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in 2022.
When Glenda releases the hardback in December, she is planning a book launch on the evening of Sunday, December 6 at The Fire Station venue in Sunderland, with proceeds going to with Love, Amelia, supporting babies and their families across Tyne and Wear and County Durham.
But it won’t be long before she’s back in her beloved Scarborough.
“I'd move there tomorrow if I could,” she says.
Music to Die For at the Seaview Hotel by Glenda Young is out now. ISBN-13: 9781035415618