Part of Series
“I’m worried...This damned black-out. I’m afraid of what may happen in the dark.” Artists’ model Althea Greville was, in life, known as something of a femme fatale. But the phrase becomes only too literal. What initially appears to be red paint leads instead to Althea’s dead body, murdered in Morosini’s renowned school of art. Hugh Collier of Scotland Yard is called in, but two more murder victims follow, one of them a female student at the school, stabbed to death at a cinema. After many a twist, Collier selects the right piece in the puzzle to identify a murderer operating under cover of England’s World War Two black-out. It is a pleasure to accompany Hugh Collier in The Art School Murders as he suavely but relentlessly pursues, and finally brings to justice, a diabolically callous killer. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
Author
Pseudonym of Katherine Mary Deville Dalton Renoir (1881-1963) Katherine Dalton was born in Hammersmith, London in 1881, the only child of a Canadian father and English mother. The author wrote two well-received early novels, Olive in Italy (1909), and The Sword of Love (1920). However, her career in crime fiction did not begin until 1924, after which Moray Dalton published twenty-nine mysteries, the last in 1951. The majority of these feature her recurring sleuths, Scotland Yard inspector Hugh Collier and private inquiry agent Hermann Glide. Moray Dalton married Louis Jean Renoir in 1921, and the couple had a son a year later. The author lived on the south coast of England for the majority of her life following the marriage. She died in Worthing, West Sussex, in 1963.
