Elly Griffths at Waterstones in King's Lynn. Photo: Alan T Shearer

Award winning crime writer Elly Griffiths was in town on Saturday signing copies of her book A Room Full of Bones, out for the first time in paperback.

Elly was inspired to write about Norfolk when her archaeologist husband told her about Seahenge and how prehistoric man had seen marshland as a sacred place.

“The entire plot for The Crossing Places [her first book] came to me in that instant,” she says. Her latest book A Room Full of Bones is set in King’s Lynn itself, in the entirely fictional Smith Museum.

“King’s Lynn Museum is fabulous,” she says, “too fabulous for my purposes. I needed to invent a rundown, backstreet museum where no-one ever visited. I was a little spooked though when I found out that the curator of the real life museum is called Mr Bones!”

Elly says that she loves writing about Norfolk and King’s Lynn in particular because there is so much history that she will never run out of plots. Her next book, though, will take her heroine Ruth up to Lancashire to investigate a death that turns out to be linked to the Pendle witches.

“But the book after that will be set firmly in Norfolk,” she says.