A man is found stabbed to death in the library of a vicarage. Who is he? What is his real background? Who murdered him? The location is Stretton Darknesse, a picturesque yet unremarkable Somerset village, resting in sight of Glastonbury Tor – the eerie conical hill crowned with a small tower. Stretton’s vicar is the Reverend Gregory Fortinbras, a tall, charismatic and manicured widower. Well liked and well-read but with a weakness for specialist literature . The lord of the manor is the aging, Sir John Pole, last of his family line, residing at, The Court, a grand country house. Private detective Cosmo Thor investigates but can he outwit Inspector Mears of Scotland Yard? 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 ‘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.
