Alice James lives in a chapel in Oxfordshire with three cats and many houseplants. Her first novel, Grave Secrets, is published by Solaris, the first in a series of genre mashups that mix cosy crime, vampires, light horror and even a touch of romance together. And zombies. There have to be zombies.

Have you noticed how books are always set in London or New York? Literally always. All books ever. Every single one of them. OK, well maybe not all of them but A Lot. That’s not the real question. The real questions is: have you ever wondered why? I’ll tell you. It’s because we authors are lazy.

It’s useful when you’re writing a book to make the mundane things as relatable as possible because it saves time. If people know a place, or even think they do, you don’t have to spend a lot of time describing it. You can get on with your plot and everyone wins. Except…what if you’ve never lived in New York? Then you have to do (deep breath) research.

Or not. I found a third way. You set your book in your home town. Even if no one’s ever heard of it and you grew up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and even if you are meant to be writing urban fantasy and you grew up on a farm. Seriously. Because anything is better than doing research.

That’s how I came to set my book in Staffordshire, the English county that no one has ever heard of, in the miniscule village of Colton. Name a famous place in Staffordshire. Yup, off you go. Ask Wikipedia. Ask Google. Ask anyone you like. Good luck. Name someone famous from Staffordshire. Take your time. Or none at all. The results will be the same.

Except that when you make this choice, when you set your book in the green and pleasant and most uninteresting shire in the land, you will accidentally end up with a brand new genre mashup you didn’t expect.

Welcome to the Undead Aga Saga.

The Aga saga is a uniquely English novel type where a bucolic backdrop of chintz tea sets and Labradors frames bunches of long-haired lasses, all clad in Tana Lawn print dresses and looking for husbands. Sitting on gingham rugs at the village green eating cucumber sandwiches, they break off husband hunting only to greet the vicar or applaud politely when Uncle Baxter scores a century before going out leg before wicket after bowling a maiden over. Sons still join the army. Cars are vintage. Babies are dimpled. No one is ever gay, except the actual maypole, and Morris Dancing isn’t a code for anything. You get my drift. The important thing is this:

There are no zombies. Absolutely none at all.

Just imagine. It’s a crying shame because there is no medium of entertainment, be it a play, film, book, poem or even graphic novel, which is not improved by the addition of a healthy zombie apocalypse. Remember how boring it was studying Chaucer at school? Now imagine if the pardoner had been eaten by a swarm of mouldering corpses; we’d all have got better grades. Remember Hamlet? God, how he did go on. And on. That play really needed him to be munched up by a shuffling army, led by the reborn and ravenous Ophelia, decaying at the audience and trailing pondweed and some intestines behind her. And I don’t mind The Great Gatsby, but how much better if the murdered Jay had got to his feet a few hours later and, still dripping ichor, reaped revenge on the society that demeaned him one cannibalistic mouthful at a time. Honestly – my school missed a lot of opportunities in my education.

I haven’t made that mistake. Grave Secrets is an Aga Saga that is just heaving with zombies. Also vampires, unsolved murders, mysterious attacks, fires, screaming, plenty of heads being ripped off and hopefully a tight plot that has a beginning a middle and, right at the back, an actual end.

I wanted to write horror, I wanted to write about zombies, I wanted to write a whodunit and I didn’t want to do any research. More importantly, I only wanted to write the one book. So I put them all in there, all under the one cover. And while there are no babies and no Labradors, to make up there is a ginger cat. And croquet. And cocktails.

And I mentioned the zombies, right?

Grave Secrets is out now from Solaris; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk