Flaxborough is a fictitious town in Lincolnshire, created by author and local journalist Colin Watson as the background for a series of detective novels featuring Detective Inspector Purbright and a cast of similar comic characters.
Flaxborough cannot be precisely identified with any real town from the texts. It was a Borough, with a borough police force and Chief Constable,[1][2] a yacht club, and docks.[3] It is often identified with Boston. But it also had a Cathedral,[2] suggesting identification with Lincoln itself - although Lincoln, or rather Lincoln Jail, explicitly gets mentioned too.[4] The descriptions of the townscape, and in particular Lucilla Teatime's antiques business or charity offices, most closely resemble Louth.[5][6]
In the suitably odd BBC television adaptation Murder Most English, most locations were filmed in Spalding.[7]