Flaxborough

Flaxborough is a series of mystery novels by thriller and mystery author Colin Watson. He was born in Croydon in 1920 to parents of modest means. He went to Whitgift School, an institution established by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1596 to offer affordable and easy medical care and education to the less fortunate of the Lambeth and Croydon parishes. As a seventeen-year-old in 1937, he got a job working for the “Boston Guardian” as a cub reporter and had to commute for several miles to get to work. It as while he was working his beat around the market town of Lincolnshire and the small hamlets around it that he found the inspiration and material he needed to pen his bestselling “Flaxborough Chronicles.” The town of Flaxborough that is the setting of the novels is more of a composite of the city of Boston and the little towns surrounding it such a Horncastle and Sleaford. The first of the series was the 1958 published “Coffin, Scarcely Used” which opened the way to eleven more titles in the series culminating in “Whatever’s Been Going on at Mumblesby?” published in 1982.