Book description
Returning from several months spent filming her lead role in a brand
new TV detective series, Phyllida Moon as misgivings about how she will
be received at the Peter Piper Detective Agency. But she has no need to
worry - she's welcomed back with open arms. And Peter has just the job
lined up for her . . . Phyllida doesn't have much trouble thinking
herself into her new role, that of Sonia Sheridan, amateur actress
extraordinaire, though she has slightly more difficulty exposing the
drug dealing thought exposing the drug dealing thought to be taking
place within the Little Theatre Company. She's on the brink of making an
amazing - and totally unexpected - discovery when suddenly something
happens that sheds a whole new light on the case. One of the theatre
company is murdered - and it looks like the killer could only be a
fellow member . . . 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.
