'Broadchurch' writer and producer Chris Chibnall’s first book sees him revisit murder in a tight-knit Dorset community

"It’s very deliberately a love letter to the place I live,” says TV writer and producer Chris Chibnall (best known for creating crime drama “Broadchurch”) of his début novel, Death at The White Hart. Set in the fictional Dorset village of Fleetcombe, it opens with Detective Sergeant Nicola Bridge—returned to the area following a crisis in her personal life—being called to investigate when a local pub’s landlord is found dead with a stag’s antlers tied to his head.

 Chibnall has lived in the Dorset market town of Bridport for more than 20 years and the area has provided inspiration for much of his work (he is based a mile from West Bay, where the beach scenes in “Broadchurch” were filmed). “I really don’t think enough attention is put on the South West,” he tells me. “I’ve fallen in love with it. I think life down here is really fascinating, but I also think it’s a microcosm of how a lot of people in the country, outside major cities, live their lives. Those rhythms, those dynamics, the relationships, the geography... I find it endlessly fascinating and I often think I don’t read enough set in that milieu.” 

 As in “Broadchurch”, the crime at the story’s centre occurs in a place where everyone knows each other—and everyone is therefore a suspect. When I ask why he finds this set-up such fertile ground, Chibnall says: “Because people know each other, when something horrific like this crime happens, the impact is felt really deeply, really quickly. It’s incredibly rich material for a narrative.” He deems the crime genre “a wondrous prism through which to examine characters’ emotional lives and motivations”, adding: “I really wanted to play in that sandbox again in a novel form, because it enables me as a writer to get right under the skin and the point of view of characters in a new way.” 

Wanting Fleetcombe to reflect society more broadly, Chibnall has included “a multiplicity of perspectives” in the book. In addition to Nicola— who is trying “to do an amazing job in a new situation where she has been promised things that do not materialise”—we follow a handful of other characters throughout the narrative. He explains: “I wanted a real spread of people; a spread of ages, genders, jobs. By the end of the novel, I wanted you to feel that you had been one of the regulars in The White Hart, and that you really had a connection to these characters.”

One character who particularly stands out is schoolgirl Shannon, who spends much of her time in the village playground quietly observing her neighbours. When I mention her, Chibnall is visibly excited. “I love that you’ve identified Shannon as a key character, because she’s close to my heart,” he tells me. “I think a child’s perspective on events is always unique.” He agrees when I suggest that children are also easily overlooked. “Yes, that’s exactly the whole story... There are a lot of overlooked characters in this novel. It’s a massive theme, people in communities that are slightly overlooked.” 

With this book, I really wanted to talk about what life is like in a South West community now

Though he refers to Death at The White Hart a “‘Broadchurch’-adjacent novel”, he acknowledges that much has moved on since he wrote the show in 2012, so with the book, he “really wanted to talk about what life is like in a South West community now.” As such, one of the novel’s characters is struggling to manage his punishing schedule as a delivery driver, while another is renting out her spare room on Airbnb. The inclusion of these elements is “absolutely a comment on the state of the world” and Chibnall ponders: “Are we wrong to expect that things will always stay the same? We are living in a time with so many shades of grey, where a definitive answer is so complex, that I really wanted to investigate that.” 

At the heart of the book are Fleetcombe’s two pubs—the titular traditional boozer and upmarket gastropub The Fox. While Chibnall regards the institution of the pub “a hub of the community” and “very integral to British identity”, he admits that, thanks to ongoing statistics about how many are closing, they also symbolise the “erosion and neglect” facing places like Fleetcombe. As much as he hopes that readers in the South West will feel “a sense of ownership over this book, because it’s very deliberately set there”, he also wants the story to reach further afield. “Hopefully that village is representative of similar ones all around the country. I would love people to feel like this resonates with the communities they know.”

Chibnall has wanted to pen a book for more than a decade, but it was only after he finished his four-year stint as showrunner on “Doctor Who” in 2022 that he had the time to. He describes the writing process as “a real labour of love”. Writing a novel was both “really different and not different” to writing a play or television show. “In the basic physical actions of plotting it beforehand, turning up to your desk, of typing for quite a long time every day, and then thinking about what you’ve written and reworking it—those things are identical. In terms of how you’re telling a story and the way you use language, the way you pace things, it’s entirely different. But it was one of the reasons I wanted to do it—to discover and try to figure out the differences and then enjoy playing in that arena.”

He has found the publishing journey “completely different” to the worlds of theatre and television and, so far, “everything has been an education and a delight”. He expands: “The stage we’re in now, of proofs and readying it for publication, that’s entirely new to me, and it’s lovely. I’m really excited to see what happens when it goes out into the world, to see how that works and to meet all the booksellers.” The deal with Michael Joseph is for two books, with the second—which he is currently conducting research for—a follow-up to Death at The White Hart. “I wanted to create characters with Nicola and [her colleague] Harry, who you will want to continue spending time with to see how their lives evolve, how their dynamic evolves... I have big plans for them if things go well.” 

He hints: “The story that I have in mind for the second book is completely different in terms of setting, but still is very much within the South West.” The force Nicola has joined is about to be merged into Three Counties Police, covering Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. “That one police force covers an absolutely extraordinarily large
and unwieldy geographical area... And that gives me access to a whole range of places, communities, people. If there’s an appetite for more, then I’ve got plenty of ideas to feed that.”