In 1995 the Totnes Times asked me to review the first novel by a former ballet dancer.

It was based on her own experience, and was called Those Who Serve.

It described the lives of young women married to officers fresh out of the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.

Though initially sceptical, I was soon hooked.

By the time I’d finished I loved it, and wrote about it with genuine enthusiasm.

It was Marcia Willett’s first ever review, and I went on to write many others; whenever you see the Totnes Times quoted on one of her novels, the words are mine.

She and her second husband Roddy, a business consultant and writer of non-fiction, were living in Avonwick at the time. We soon met, and they became good friends.

We would regularly get together in Rumour wine bar in Totnes for coffee or a drink. Roddy and I contributed the historical chapters for a book on his home town of Dartmouth, and I occasionally provided Marcia with local lore.

They helped in various ways when I started my own publishing business.

It did not surprise me when Marcia became a best-selling novelist, though I hadn’t expected her to be so popular in translation throughout Europe and beyond (eighteen languages altogether).

I remember our pleasure when she brought me a copy of her first book to be published in German: the only review quoted in it was by ‘Bob Mann in der Totnes Times.’

I imagined buyers at the Frankfurt Book Fair seeing this, and deciding that it must be good, if endorsed by such authority!

It always amused me that, much as I enjoyed them, the world of Marcia’s novels was so far from my own experience.

Her people are invariably well-heeled, usually with a military background, living comfortably on the edge of Dartmoor or the South Hams coast.

They send their children to private boarding schools, only seeing them for a rare exeat (not a word we used at the local comprehensive), and do their shopping and socialising in Tavistock, Kingsbridge, Dartmouth or Totnes.

We are told which shops, bars and cafes they go to, and the real names of the people who run them.

I was delighted to find that two characters in her Totnes book The Songbird (2016) had been to a talk of mine at the library.

Although some of her works are set further afield, in Cornwall or on Exmoor, Marcia Willett Country is essentially South Devon, and she evokes its landscapes, and its flora and fauna, as perfectly as she describes the lives of what would once have been called its gentry.

Marcia and Roddy moved to West Devon for a while, before returning to the South Hams, first in South Brent and finally Dartington, so we resumed our Totnes meetings, either at Rumour or, in the summer, outside the Brioche cafe in the High Street.

Roddy died in 2015, but I continued to see Marcia occasionally.

When she told me earlier this year that she had inoperable cancer and that the best she could hope for was to be kept comfortable, her concern was not for her own sufferings, but solely that she’d be able to finish her last book.

She displayed the courage and stoicism I associate with many of her more mature characters, one of whom states that ‘old age is not for cissies!’ - a sentiment I shall try to remember as the years progress.

When I last saw her in February she was able to say the book was with the publisher and in the acknowledgements she thanked all those who had supported her career over the years, including me for that first review.

Marcia died on 30th June, and now here is that book, Christmas at the Keep, and this is therefore my last Marcia Willett review (I have to keep reminding myself that she won’t ever see it).

We are back at The Keep, a wholly imaginary house near Staverton, inhabited for nearly two centuries by members of the Chadwick family, many of whom we have met in previous novels.

The house they converge on may be fictional, but everywhere else they go is likely to be very familiar – the Dartington Hall gardens and Cider Press Centre, the Cott Inn, Buckfast Abbey, various galleries and cafes in Totnes.

It’s a short book, the writing is precise and concentrated, much of it in dialogue, without a superfluous word or sentence.

I’ll give nothing away except to say that generations interact, couples misunderstand each other, old resentments and annoyances intrude - but the overall feeling is mellow and accepting. Classic Marcia Willett, in fact, and those who love her work will relish every page.

Sadly, there will be no more. But we can hardly complain, with so much to revisit if we know her books, and to discover for the first time if we don’t – thirty two novels under her own name and four as Willa Marsh, and all, of course, written after the age of fifty. That is plenty to keep us reading and re-reading for a lifetime.

Christmas at the Keep by Marcia Willett is available at Bantam Press, ISBN 9781787633230.