The Fens - Setting in Fiction

Setting in Fiction

Some authors have featured the Fens repeatedly in their work. For example:

• John Gordon, adolescent fiction writer and author of The Giant Under The Snow, has drawn inspiration for many of his supernatural fantasies from the Fens. His books with Fenland themes include: Ride The Wind, Fen Runners and The House On The Brink, which is based on Peckover House in Wisbech.
• Peter F. Hamilton sets a number of his science fiction novels in the Fens, including Mindstar Rising and A Quantum Murder.
• Bill Hussey set two horror books, Through a Glass Darkly and The Absence, in the Fens.
• M.R. James set several of his ghost stories in the fen country.
• Jim Kelly set both The Water Clock and The Moon Tunnel in the Fens.
• Philippa Pearce, a children's author, set many of her books in the Fens, for example Tom's Midnight Garden.
• Gladys Mitchell, prolific writer of detective fiction, took her eccentric sleuth, the psychiatrist Mrs Lestrange Bradley, to the Fens in several books, notably The Worsted Viper, Wraiths and Changelings and The Mudflats of the Dead.
• Nick Warburton has written a series of radio plays entitled On Mardle Fen, one of the longest running series of plays on BBC R4.
• G.A. Henty's book Beric the Briton mentions some sections in the Fens.

The following novels, or substantial portions of them, are set in the Fens:

• Sabine Baring-Gould: Cheap Jack Zita;
• Penelope Fitzgerald: The Bookshop;
• Hal Foster: Prince Valiant;
• Martha Grimes: The Case Has Altered, set in and around Algarkirk, Lincolnshire;
• Charles Kingsley: Hereward the Wake;
• Louis L'Amour: Sackett's Land;
• Simon Marriott Woller
• Sile Rice: The Saxon Tapestry, about Hereward the Wake;
• Dorothy Sayers: The Nine Tailors;
• Gregory Macguire: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister;
• Graham Swift: Waterland (made into a film, listed below);
• Robert Westall: Futuretrack 5.
• Philip Pullman: Northern Lights

Some films have large portions set in the Fenlands:

• Dad Savage (1998), starring Patrick Stewart, was set and filmed around the King's Lynn area.
• Waterland (1992), directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, is based on Graham Swift's book with the same title. Many of its scenes were filmed at Holbeach Marsh on the edge of the Wash.

At least one video game has also been set in the Fens:

• "The Bedford Level" appears in the video game Tom Clancy's EndWar as a possible battlefield.