Book description
Following the disappearance of a big-time bank robber,
Detective-Inspector Neil Carter of Scotland Yard is sent unofficially by
his Chief to question the man's lovely, enigmatic wife in the idyllic
village where she has retired to her father's house. Ostensibly a
holiday-maker, dallying with the lady, and striking up a friendship with
her perceptive 12-year-old brother, Neil soon decides he is on 'a
delightful wild goose chase'. But his cover is blown when he is forced
to take action in the face of another and far more horrible crime.
Although he has no official role in its investigation, Neil has never
felt so personally involved in a crime, finding himself strangely
troubled at the possibility that a clergyman could be guilty of murder
and sacrilege. The inhabitants of the village are vividly alive through
the eyes of Neil and young Tony, and in their reactions to the outrage
in their midst. Neil's part in the two investigations ends only on his
final return to London, with the sharpest shock of his whole
extraordinary 'holiday'. 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.
