Few writers can claim to have immersed themselves so deeply in their subject as the lawyer and prizewinning author Martin Beales, . His book, Dead Not Buried, which won the Crime Writers' Association Golden Dagger award for non-fiction in 1995, effectively reopened the case of the Hay poisoner, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, who was hanged in 1922, and at whose very desk Beales worked as a solicitor in Wales. Shortly after moving with his family into the large Victorian house known as Mayfields, in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Beales received a manuscript which suggested that one of its previous occupants, Major Armstrong, who was executed for poisoning his wife with arsenic, might have been innocent. Intrigued and motivated by the remarkable coincidence that he was not only living in Armstrong's old home, but working for the same firm and at the same desk as the Hay poisoner had decades earlier, Beales employed all his legal skills to investigate the case. A meeting with the Armstrongs' youngest daughter, Margaret, and a re-examination of all the trial papers and unpublished documents resulted in the acclaimed Dead Not Buried, later republished as The Hay Poisoner. The book's theme was that Armstrong had not received a fair trial and there were grounds to believe that he could have been the victim of a jealous rival and small-town gossip, resulting in a miscarriage of justice. Beales died of cancer at Mayfields (now called the Mantles. Abridged from an article in The Guardian