Part of Series
The Ketterick Festival revolves around the Saracen’s Head, a Jacobean inn with its inn-yard and balconies miraculously preserved intact, due to the sloth of successive landlords. Here in festival time are performed the lesser-known masterpieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. This year it is The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe (a play of uncertain authorship, since no one owned up at the time). But the actors find that the Saracen’s Head has been transformed by its new landlord – an Australian know-all with an insatiable curiosity and an instinct for power. The loathsome Des’s activities bring him into conflict with actors, committee, even the performers of Adelaide di Birckenhead, the little-known Donizetti opera that is the other lynchpin of the Festival programme. So adept is Des at fomenting friction and ferreting in the undergrowth of private lives that it is not surprising that it all ends in biers.
Author
Aka Bernard Bastable. Robert Barnard (born 23 November 1936) was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. Born in Essex, Barnard was educated at the Royal Grammar School in Colchester and at Balliol College in Oxford. His first crime novel, A Little Local Murder, was published in 1976. The novel was written while he was a lecturer at University of Tromsø in Norway. He has gone on to write more than 40 other books and numerous short stories. Barnard has said that his favourite crime writer is Agatha Christie. In 1980 he published a critique of her work titled A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. Barnard was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2003 by the Crime Writers Association for a lifetime of achievement. Under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable, Robert Barnard has published one standalone novel and three alternate history books starring Wolfgang Mozart as a detective, he having survived to old age. Barnard lived with his wife Louise in Yorkshire. Series: * Perry Trethowan * Charlie Peace
