The plot thickens

Words by Hannah Tapping

Former medieval Cornish language scholar turned crime writer, Myrna Combellack, delivers a novel that is both entertaining and authentic in equal measure.

When Myrna Combellack sits down to write crime fiction, she brings something rare to the page: authenticity forged from decades of living between Cornwall’s two worlds. As a former academic specialising in medieval Cornish language at the University of Exeter, and later a schoolteacher who experienced the realities of life both locally and abroad, Myrna understands the stark contrasts that define modern Cornwall and she’s not afraid to write about them. 

Her latest novel, Lithium Betty, plunges readers into a Gothic thriller set against the backdrop of Cornwall’s mining heritage and its uncertain future. The story follows Betty, a carer who discovers a body in a remote clifftop castle and becomes entangled in a sinister conspiracy involving a corrupt police commissioner, international mining interests and a mineral rights wrangle.

Myrna’s journey to crime fiction writing began in childhood. Born in 1948, she grew up as an only child in a remote Cornish village where drinking water had to be fetched from a natural spring on Carn Marth, half a mile away. Myrna tells me: “I began reading and writing as soon as I could. Without electricity, there was no entertainment, except learning to play the piano, sewing, knitting, cooking and walking. I knew every road and lane for miles around. I remember men in brightly coloured, short sleeved shirts wandering about the lanes. They were miners returning from abroad. The hillsides were littered with heavy mining equipment and in the valley, there were the remains of the tin stamps, which my mother remembered working. There were cold arsenic flues and engine houses. A child could stay out all day, but we were warned never to stray off the path, because the ground, covered in heather and gorse, could give way, and you could be lost forever in some shaft. It might take months to find you.”

“School was school,” continues Myrna, “with a map on the wall with a lot of pink, which depicted British territories. Cornwall was special. It gave fast steam and the industrial revolution to the world. In the graveyards, the headstones recorded not only those who had remained or returned to the parish, but also those who died in Mexico, South Africa, Australia, South America and the United States. Our family had cousins in all of those places, so the wide world was already a familiar place.  After studying English at university, I then worked for many years for the University of Exeter as an academic, still watching and scribbling, and I’ve never stopped writing fiction set in real Cornwall.”

Despite her literary background, Myrna is refreshingly pragmatic about her craft. Working with her mentor Oliver Harris, a spy thriller writer, she learned the mathematics of successful crime fiction: a dead body within five pages, complications building to three-quarters through, then the unravelling. “It can be done almost mathematically,” she admits. Yet within these structures, Myrna’s distinctive voice emerges, one that is humorous, gritty, and unflinchingly honest about Cornwall’s economic realities. “There are rich pickings in Cornwall for the writer who is able to observe with a keen eye,” she tells me. “Winston Graham is a case in point. In his historical Poldark novels, he researched the complexities of mining, banking and political influences on his characters, rich and poor.” 

Researching for Lithium Betty, Myrna delved deep into Cornwall’s mining traditions, its history, government grants and the environmental implications. The novel grapples with real tensions: international companies eyeing Cornwall’s mineral wealth, local communities desperate for prosperity and the collision between heritage and development.

Lithium Betty opens with its protagonist arriving at a clifftop castle (inspired by Carn Brea but larger, more Gothic) to care for the elderly Lady Legeia, only to find her already dead. What unfolds is part murder mystery, part social commentary, as Betty navigates three very weird sisters, a corrupt police commissioner with designs on mineral rights and her own husband’s mysterious connection to an international mining conglomerate. While the novel’s setting is fictional, it evokes Camborne and Redruth, mining towns where prosperity has departed and hope hinges on lithium and tin extraction. By the end, the international company has transformed the castle into its European headquarters. It’s a tale that’s ambiguous, unsettling and deliberately so. “It’s quite kind of sinister, the way the international company works,” Myrna notes. 

Her tongue-in-cheek approach asks uncomfortable questions about who truly benefits when Cornwall becomes a commodity and Myrna is committed to showing her readers something beyond the Cornwall that exists when the visitors leave, when the mine closures bite, when the choice is one of survival. It’s this tension, between romance and reality, heritage and progress, insider and outsider, that makes Myrna’s crime fiction genuinely compelling.

Lithium Betty by Myrna Combellack (PBK, RRP £18.00) is published by Lendal Press in November 2025. 

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