Strange Magic: An Essex Witch Museum Mystery

by Syd Moore

Overview

Rosie Strange doesn't believe in ghosts or witches or magic. No, not at all. It’s no surprise therefore when she inherits the ramshackle Essex Witch Museum, her first thought is to take the money and run.

Still, the museum exerts a curious pull over Rosie. There’s the eccentric academic who bustles in to demand she help in a hunt for old bones, those of the notorious Ursula Cadence, a witch long since put to death. And there’s curator Sam Stone, a man about whom Rosie can’t decide if he’s tiresomely annoying or extremely captivating. It all adds up to looking like her plans to sell the museum might need to be delayed, just for a while.

Finding herself and Sam embroiled in a most peculiar centuries-old mystery, Rosie is quickly expelled from her comfort zone, where to her horror, the secrets of the past come with their own real, and all too present, danger as a strange magic threatens to envelope them all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786070982
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Series:	The Essex Witch Museum Mysteries , #1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Syd Moore is best known for her Essex Witch Museum Mysteries (Strange Magic, Strange Sight, Strange Fascination, Strange Tombs and later in 2020, Strange Tricks). The series was shortlisted for the Good Reader Holmes and Watson Award 2018. She has twice been shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2019 and 2020. Her debut screenplay, Witch West, which she developed from an original idea, has been optioned by Hidden Door Productions and will be released in Autumn 2021. She lives in Essex.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"I gleefully submitted to this tale of witchcraft, feminism, mysterious strangers, historical atrocities, plucky heroines and ghastly apparitions — and came away more proud than ever to be an Essex girl. STRANGE MAGIC is the rarest of things: a book which sets out unashamedly to entertain, and does so with wit, style and erudition."

—Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

Interviews

This is your third book about witches – what draws you to the subject?

It’s always been an interest of mine. Witches always seemed so much more interesting than the passive vapid princesses waiting to be rescued or married. Witches were active, they did stuff, they had respect, even if that translated into fear. They had power. I mean, look at Maleficent – she could transform herself into a dragon! Who doesn’t want to be able to transform into a dragon?

As I got older I began to realize that this was a very binary reduction and that the real witch trials had been full of nuance. Ironically the witches I discovered often had no power at all, temporal or otherwise. I found it unjust and began to research into the legend of a local witch in the town where I live. I fell under the spell of her tragic story and have never managed to leave the subject alone since.


Who was Ursula Kemp? How does her real-life story influence STRANGE MAGIC?

About ten years ago I came across a rather odd photograph of human remains. The caption beneath it read “Skeleton of Witch found at St Osyth.” The photograph was very old, but you could make out a skeleton in an open grave. The arms were pinned down tightly beside the ribcage and pelvis, the palms pressed to the tops of the femur where the thighs would have once been. The knees had been brought unnaturally close together. But it was the skull that really arrested me. The lower jaw had become disconnected from the upper and, to my mind, it looked like the skull was set into a silent scream that had gone unheard for centuries.

After reading about the state in which the bones were found, I became even more disturbed: it had been pinned to the ground by iron bolts that had been driven into the elbows and knees. There was something grotesque about the vandalism of these remains that had once been a living breathing person.

The skeleton was, I learned, allegedly that of an Essex woman accused of witchcraft. Her name was Ursula Kemp and she was put to death in 1582. The photograph was intriguingly dated to 1921.

The image haunted me — I could not rid myself of Ursula’s silent scream and so over the next months and years I let her guide me on. First to the tiny village in North East Essex, St Osyth, where, I discovered, she had been the local healer and midwife. She used to heal through herbs and potions and the laying on of hands, which was quite common at the time but was becoming a risky profession. She was poor and a peasant without much power but was pursued in a zealous fever by the lord of the manor.

I was rather shocked to discover that Ursula, unusually for the time, confessed to using magic. In fact she described to the lord a spell she used in some great detail. It comprised an outlandish and bizarre potion and ritual which, also unusually for the time, happened to work. I became determined to get to the bottom of what happened to this woman, exploring why she ended up in the sorry state depicted in the photograph of 1921.

My investigations took me on wild and unexpected encounters with filmmakers, wiccans, curators, artists and taxi drivers all with their own stories to tell about the witch. Much of these shone an uncomfortable light on the bigotry, hatred and bullying that Ursula endured and which sadly still exists in the world today. But they also illuminated the great kindnesses, noble deeds, and compassion that were to weave their own strange magic on me as this extraordinary story began to unfold.


Do you equate witches and witchcraft with feminism?

I think the witch symbolizes a lot of things that women as a whole have had to suffer through and there is a saying that “every woman is born a witch.” Because the witch really represents woman as outsider, as “other,” as different to the mainstay of the powerbase — man. She is both Lilith and Eve. Temptress, fornicator, holder of the glamour, which was in itself originally a spell.

In the sixties, she was indeed a symbol of feminism. W.I.T.C.H. was founded in 1968 in the US and was a movement that fused many women’s groups. The name W.I.T.C.H. was an acronym for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. But I don’t think that was a concrete title. I’ve heard that it also included Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History and Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays. In one of their leaflets they wrote “If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident.”

Recently the rapper Azalia Banks declared herself a witch. However the response from the Right Wing press was fear — as if she was about to climb on her broomstick and start eating babies. Weirdly, it seems reaction and debate about witches and witchcraft continues to evoke irrational, primal fear in some of the most secular. I don’t know if this is because of the connections to magic or because witches don’t conform to convention, and therefore social controls. Anarchy has always been the establishment’s greatest fear.

Whatever the reason, one thing remains true – witch hunts are very much alive today. Not metaphorical ones — real ones — with tests and torture and witchfinders. In Kenya the victims are usually old women suffering dementia. In Nigeria it’s children. In India the low caste, single women, widows or old couples are the target. In Saudi Arabia and Papua New Guinea no one is safe. Just as in the 16th and 17th centuries this all seems to be about scapegoating and superstition, hysteria and hidden agendas. But it’s not just on the rise “over there.” The Metropolitan Police in London have created Project Violet, which responds to cases of witchcraft-related abuse, right here, right now.

So I guess what I’m saying is that although the witch is seen as predominantly female, she’s not just a feminist icon, but a symbol of those abused simply for the reason that they are different.

Editorial Reviews

04/24/2017
British author Moore (Witch Hunt) inaugurates a promising supernatural thriller trilogy with this suspenseful novel introducing unlikely sleuth Rosie Strange. Rosie, a benefits fraud investigator, has an unusual inheritance to deal with: the Great Essex Witch Museum, which her grandfather founded to preserve the history of a part of England that was a hotbed for accusations of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. Rosie visits the museum only to get a sense of the property’s value and to advise the staff that it will be put on the market as soon as possible. But George Chin, a university professor and expert on early modern English, upsets those plans when he shows up at the museum with an odd request. The academic offers Rosie and Sam Stone, the curator, a substantial reward if they can find the remains of Ursula Cadence, an accused witch from centuries ago who may be responsible for the demonic possession of an eight-year-old boy who has been in a coma since falling out of a tree. Moore deftly integrates a romantic subplot into the paranormal story line. (June)

Publishers Weekly

'Dennis Wheatley meets Caitlin Moran.'

Starburst

‘Confident, down-to-earth Essex girl Rosie is an appealing character, and there is plenty of spooky fun in this spirited genre mashup.’

Guardian

‘A brilliant beginning to a highly original new series. I promise, this book will hold you spellbound!’

Crimesquad

‘Strange Magic is that rarest of things: a book which sets out unashamedly to entertain, and does so with wit, style, and erudition. I gleefully submitted to a tale of witchcraft, feminism, mysterious strangers, historical atrocities, plucky heroines and ghastly apparitions – and came away more proud than ever to be an Essex girl.’

author of The Essex Serpent Sarah Perry

‘A witty, whip-smart read that captivates the reader and conjures a plot full of danger, fun and romance...the characters are brilliant – relatable, real, witty and warm. The plot is a puzzling mystery that sweeps the reader along, and Moore's voice as a writer is one that will make the reader want to go out and buy her other books.’

Bookbag

PRAISE FOR STRANGE MAGIC


"I gleefully submitted to this tale of witchcraft, feminism, mysterious strangers, historical atrocities, plucky heroines and ghastly apparitions — and came away more proud than ever to be an Essex girl. STRANGE MAGIC is the rarest of things: a book which sets out unashamedly to entertain, and does so with wit, style and erudition."


—Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent


"British author Moore inaugurates a promising supernatural thriller trilogy with this suspenseful novel introducing unlikely sleuth Rosie Strange... Moore deftly integrates a romantic subplot into the paranormal story line."


—Publishers Weekly

"Rosie is an unpretentious protagonist who is fun to root for as she suffers no fools.... the future adventures of the Great Essex Witch Museum should make for prime guilty-pleasure reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher