The Dales Detective author Julia Chapman on how market town Settle inspired her 10-book novel series

The square is where Julia and I meet for our walk around the town that inspired the stomping ground of private detectives Delilah Metcalfe and Samson O’Brien. Perhaps the most recognisable feature of both Bruncliffe and Settle is the crag that looms high above their winding streets, watchful and ever-present, yet endlessly resetting with the light.

It is 14 years since Julia and her husband, Mark, drove into Settle while looking for somewhere to live in the Yorkshire Dales. “We both got out of the car and we just went, ‘Oh my goodness, this is it’,” she says.

Community - its institutions, and especially its people, from pillars and stalwarts to outsiders and disruptors - underpins the Dales Detective series, of which the 10th and final novel, Date With Destiny, has just been published.

Julia Chapman (her real surname is Stagg) was born and raised in Coventry, in a large extended Irish family, the youngest of three girls to Michael, a carpenter, and Ellen, a nurse who studied at night school for her O- and A-levels, and then went to university. “I was at mum’s graduation at Coventry Cathedral and, even to this day, it's one of the proudest moments of my life,” Julia says.

They had no TV but her father would regale the family with tales of what had gone on at work, or one time, the entire plot of Jaws.

When she was around four, her mother bought Letts diaries for her daughters. “I think it was the beginning of a fiction career,” Julia says. “I started lying in my diary because I had nothing to put in it, and so I'd say, ‘I've had an amazing day, did my piano practice’, which I hadn’t.”

At 18, she left to study English at Sheffield University, after which she lived in Australia, then moved to Japan in 1991, initially for a year, to teach English as a foreign language. She stayed for six years.

“In rural Japan, they'd come up and touch my hair, try and touch my eyes. And so you got used to that idea that being outside of something is actually quite a nice perspective, and I think that's my perspective in pretty much everything I've written.”

Mark, an old school friend, asked if he could visit her. “He came out for two weeks, stayed for four, and I handed in my notice,” she says.

“I did a Masters when I came back in Applied Linguistics at Durham, and then got a job in Manchester teaching asylum seekers and refugees, which was probably the most rewarding job I've ever had. And the most difficult.”

But when Mark, a mechanical engineer, had to transfer to his company’s HQ in North Carolina, Julia went with him. “I wasn't allowed to work,” she says. “I had no more excuses. I started writing.”

Her first novel (which has never been published) was set in Japan, although work on it halted when they moved back to Britain after two years, and Julia got a job at Manchester University. It was a demanding role, and took all her creative energy, which meant writing was difficult. So they moved to France, to a village in the Ariege Pyrenees region, where they bought an auberge and turned it into a popular B&B and cycling retreat.

“I finished off the Japanese novel, and finally decided I could no longer put off applying, because that's where people get nervous,” she says. “It's that whole process of getting an agent, putting it in front of people.

“I just got rejection after rejection. In 2008, I got the final rejection for it, and it was kind of an open door in publishing, in that it said ‘this book is written in the first person, which I don't like, and it's set in Japan, which won't sell, and it doesn't have a plot, but If you fix those three things, I will consider it’.”

Julia decided instead to write a new novel, set in a French village. “In probably 10 minutes, I had the idea for a series based around the institutions in a village.”

She sent it to the same agent, who took it on and within three weeks had found her a publisher and a three-book deal. L’Auberge, the first of the five-book Fogas Chronicles, was published in 2011.

Within weeks Hodder had sold them to Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy, although they were less successful in the UK, and, ironically, in France. “Now they've bought them and they're selling really well,” Julia says.

Julia wrote only the first Fogas book while living in France. Now she had the book deal, she needed to clear time and space to write , and so, after six years of building the business, she and Mark sold up to move to the Yorkshire Dales. Since the move, they have taken up fell running, which can help resolve plot niggles. “Anything that releases your brain,” she says.

For her second series of novels, the location was, of course, on her doorstep. Date With Death, the first Dales Detective book, was published in 2017, after a publishers’ auction, again resulting in a three-book contract.

Samson was the first character she created, Bruncliffe-born yet an outsider who has been away for several years. Once she had her Samson, he had to have his Delilah. “She is the absolute linchpin of the society because she has cousins and brothers, she's so interwoven amongst Bruncliffe,” Julia says.

“I love that dichotomy of somebody who's an outsider and somebody who isn't, and they bounce well off each other.”

The Dales Detective series now sells in 10 territories across the world, and in France, they have been made into a TV series called Rendez-vous Avec Le Crime, produced by the same company that makes Call My Agent. “They are filming the third and fourth episodes as we speak,” Julia says.

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A UK option by Saffron Cherry, which makes Sally Lindsay’s The Madame Blanc Mysteries, has lapsed, which means another production company could snap it up. Aidan Turner might make an ideal Samson, and Julia thinks All Creatures Great and Small’s Anna Madeley would be brilliant as cleaner-cum-office manager Ida Capstick, saying: “She has that ability to be severe and show tenderness. Every scene she's in, she steals.

“I don't tend to age my characters because the series takes place over two-and-a-half years, from Samson coming back to the final scene. Whereas in actual writing time, it's taken me the best part of nine years.

“That's why there's no mention of anything like Covid, because it just would put them in the real world, and it exists in its own little time.”

Although she dislikes the term, the “cosy crime” sector has been boosted by Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. “It opened the door,” she says. “You walk into Waterstones and there's a table on the left that’s got light crime on it.”

And now, it's the final chapter for the Dales Detective series. In fact, Julia has had fthe final scene in her head for 10 years, right from the beginning.

“When you finish any book, I think there's always a little bit of relief, pride, but then closely followed by grief,” she says.

“My editor would rather that I didn't stop, my French editor would rather I didn't stop, the fans of the books would rather I didn't stop, but I want to try something different.”

She will not say what that is yet, only that it will be character-driven and community-based. “But it is quite different,” she adds.

“It is a lot of work but I'm really enjoying writing it, and that's the true test, isn't it? If you're enjoying what you're doing, then you know. Ask me in a year’s time.”

Date With Destiny is published by Pan.