The white stuccoed front of Kingsclere House, seat of the Meryon family, glimmered in the wintry twilight. Perched at the end of a long avenue of leafless elms, the Cornish country house was an imposing sight to Rosamund Lang fresh off the train from London. The woman at the agency had advised against her against the appointment, as had the foreboding prediction of medium, Madame Aurelia, but Rosamund needed a job and the setting was spectacular with the isle of Lundy on the horizon. Murder would be the next visitor to Kingsclere and it is up to Richard West, on leave from the Indian Police and an expert in eastern poisons to investigate. Together with Inspector Fordham he collaborates to solve this most puzzling of crimes. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Moray Dalton was the pen name of Katherine Mary Deville Dalton Renoir. Katherine was born in 1881 in Hammersmith, London to an American father and a Canadian mother. After writing two mainstream novels, her first crime novel, The Kingsclere Mystery was published in 1924. She would write a total of twenty-nine crime novels by 1951. One of many female writers who chose a male pseudonym to compete in the genre, Moray Dalton is one of the most under-rated crime authors of the ‘Golden Age’. Among the characters she created were the percipient and persistent private detective Hermann Glide and most popular of all, the young and woman-shy Scotland Yard inspector, Hugh Collier, who stared in a fifteen-book series. After living most of her life on the south coast of England, Katherine Renoir died in Worthing in 1963. PRAISE FOR MORAY DALTON ‘The author writes in an excellent, clear, vivid style’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Her mysteries [are] superbly readable examples of the fine art of English murder-fiction’ Curtis Evans ‘Commands the absorbed attention of the reader’ Boston Transcript ‘The mystery is well sustained’ New York Times
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.
