Book description
Actress Phyllida Moon, whose day job is PI at the Peter Piper Detective
Agency in Seaminster, should have been off pursuing her love life in
Scotland - but a gall bladder operation put an end to that. Her forced
period of convalescence turns out to be too good an opportunity for DCS
Kendrick to miss. Though he's only accepted Phyllida's help grudgingly
in the past, he finds he just can't do without her. There have been a
series of suspiciously premature heart attacks at Stansfield Manor
Nursing Home and he appeals to Phyllida to investigate as a patient -
real and undercover all at once. Phyllida, who has only ever
investigated in disguise before, now faces the peculiar challenge of
having to act herself. As an only child, Eileen Dewhurst was
self-sufficient and bookish from an early age, preferring solitude or
one-to-one contacts to groups, and hating sport. Her first attempts at
writing were not auspicious. At 14, a would-be family saga was aborted
by an uncle discovering it and quoting from it choked with laughter. A
second setback came a few years later at school, when a purple passage
was returned with the words 'Cut this cackle!' written across it in red
ink: a chastening lesson in how embellishments can weaken rather than
strengthen one's message. Eileen read English at Oxford, and afterwards
spent some unmemorable years in 'Admin' before breaking free and
dividing her life in two: winters in London doing temporary jobs to earn
money and experience, summers at home as a freelance journalist,
spinning 'think pieces' for the Liverpool Daily Post and any other
publications that would take them, and reporting on food and fashion for
the long defunct Illustrated Liverpool News, as well as writing a few
plays. Her first sustained piece of writing was a fantasy for children
which was never published but secured an agent. Her Great
Autobiographical Novel was never published either, although damned with
faint praise and leading to an attempt at crime writing that worked:
over the next thirty years she produced almost a book a year and also
published some short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine. Eileen has always written from an ironic stance, never
allowing her favourite characters to take themselves too seriously: a
banana skin is ever lurking.
