The Draycott Murder Mystery: A Golden Age Mystery - Softcover

Thynne, Molly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911413511 ISBN 13: 9781911413516

Publisher: Dean Street Press, 2016

Synopsis

There was something about those hands, with their strangely crisped fingers, as though they had been arrested in the very act of closing, that somehow gave the lie to the woman’s attitude of sleep.

A howling gale … A lonely farmhouse … the tread of a mysterious stranger … and then the corpse of a beautiful blonde, seemingly stopped in the act of writing.

This is all a bit much for local bobby PC Gunnet, especially when it seems the dead – and aristocratic – woman shouldn’t even have been there in the first place. But nonetheless the owner of the farm, John Leslie, is convicted, and his guilt looks certain. Certain, that is, until the eccentric Allen “Hatter” Fayre, an old India hand, begins to look more deeply into the case and discovers more than one rival suspect in this classic and satisfying puzzler.

The Draycott Murder Mystery, a whodunit hinging enigmatically on the evidence of a fountain pen, was first published in 1928. This new edition, the first for many decades, includes a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

About this title

About the Author

Mary 'Molly' Thynne was born in 1881, a member of the aristocracy, and related, on her mother's side, to the painter James McNeil Whistler. She grew up in Kensington and at a young age met literary figures like Rudyard Kipling and Henry James. Her first novel, An Uncertain Glory, was published in 1914, but she did not turn to crime fiction until The Draycott Murder Mystery, the first of six golden age mysteries she wrote and published in as many years, between 1928 and 1933. The last three of these featured Dr. Constantine, chess master and amateur sleuth par excellence. Molly Thynne never married. She enjoyed travelling abroad, but spent most of her life in the village of Bovey Tracey, Devon, where she was finally laid to rest in 1950.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911413511
• ISBN 13: 9781911413516
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 214