The ghostly North Yorkshire legend that has inspired former diplomat Jean Harrod's latest novel series

At the time Harrod first heard of the tale, the retired diplomat had signed up to a playwriting course at York Theatre Royal. She wrote the legend into a modern day play and won a competition for the production to be staged at the theatre back in 2014. After that, Harrod turned her hand to writing her series of international crime thrillers, following diplomat protagonist Jess Turner. But Kitty’s story was never far from her mind.

“During the lockdown, I found it quite hard to write my normal series,” says Harrod, who lives in Helmsley. “There was so much going on, death everywhere, it was such a traumatic time…I thought about Kitty again and thought I’d write the play into a novel. I did a lot of research during the pandemic and then wrote the book.”

It Began with a Ghost Story is set in the present day when heroine Grace Winter and her two friends visit a house in Hutton-le-Hole that Grace has inherited on her mother’s death. The women soon find themselves caught up in a murder – a young man has been killed at Lowna Ford, a place that locals believe is still haunted by Kitty Garthwaite’s ghost.

The book is set to be the first in a series of Grace Winter murder mysteries set in the region. Harrod is on with writing the next one - and she’s also working once again on her diplomat series, with a fourth book now in the pipeline. Those are each inspired by her former career working overseas as a British diplomat. She spent much of her life in embassies and high commissions around the world and her writing is tied to the countries where she has lived and visited.

Her first novel, Deadly Diplomacy, is set in Australia, where Harrod worked as the British Deputy High Commissioner for several years. There, her character is a consul, an official representative of her government whose role it is to assist and protect citizens of her own country. Harrod spent three years as a consul in Indonesia.

“I spent my life travelling around the islands of Indonesia attending trials and visiting prisons and trying to help Britons in all kinds of circumstances,” she says. “The islands are so varied and the cultures are so different…It was a very interesting time. It was quite traumatic dealing with all these incidents and all these Britons who were in trouble. Some people unfortunately died.”

Harrod, who was born in Harrow, London, was drawn into the career after a talk at school. A personnel officer from the Foreign Office visited her college to talk about the opportunities available within the department. “As soon as she started talking to me about all of the countries I could travel to and all the embassies and capital cities I could live and work in, I was completely determined to be a diplomat,” Harrod reflects.

She was just 18 when she joined the Foreign Office and after just a few months was sent abroad for a conference in Geneva, an attempt for dialogue between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. It was there she also met her husband, a fellow diplomat. “I got off to a very early start at a very important conference and met lots of really clever, intelligent diplomats,” Harrod says. “I was like a little sponge, taking it all in and I had some really great teachers in the British diplomats there at the time.”

She and her husband were then sent on a posting to work in the embassy in East Berlin. “It was a real eye opener living and working behind the Iron Curtain,” she reflects. “The Berlin Wall was still up and people were trying to get out of East Germany, trying to flee the regime. People were being shot dead for trying to get over the wall or tunnel under it. It was a still a very cold, austere atmosphere, great mistrust between the West and the East.”

Harrod also spent time as the Head of the Governor’s Office in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, where she set her second book Deadly Deceit. Her third novel in the diplomat series, Missing in Shanghai, follows two timelines, one in present day London and the second in Shanghai, China in 1984.

Harrod spent three years in the British Embassy in Peking from 1980 and then helped set up a new British-Consulate General in Shanghai. It had been a very closed off society during the Cultural Revolution, she says, and many of the Chinese people were not used to seeing foreigners.

When she and fellow diplomats travelled to different regions, “we could bring towns to a standstill. People would follow us down the streets and try to talk to us and touch our hair and skin. We never felt threatened. It was all just curiosity and wanting to know about us and where we were from.”

Though she was interested in doing so, Harrod had little time for creative writing during her career but has pursued it with earnest since. “It’s much harder than I ever thought it was going to be, creating characters and being able to bring them to life on the page,” she says. "I try to give readers a bit of escapism.”

It Began with a Ghost Story is out now. Harrod is due to give a talk at Kirkbymoorside Library on November 10.