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Take No Farewell

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Geoffrey Staddon had never forgotten the house called Clouds Frome, his first important commission and the best thing he had ever done as an architect. Twelve years before the day in September 1923 when a paragraph in the newspaper made his blood run cold, he had turned his back on it for the last time, turned his back on the woman he loved, and who loved him. But when he read that Consuela Caswell had been charged with murder by poisoning he knew, with a certainty that defied the great divide of all those years, that she could not be guilty.
As the remorse and shame of his own betrayal of her came flooding back, he knew too that he could not let matters rest. And when she sent her own daughter to him, pleading for help, he knew that he must return at last to Clouds Frome and to the dark secret that it held.
This book was my homage to the classical detective story of the inter-war years - with a few twists, naturally. There’s no private detective, for a start, just Geoffrey Staddon, architect and general good chap, baffled by the misfortunes that have overtaken his middle age and looking for answers in the Edwardian past.
You won’t be surprised that his search for those answers is long and painful. But he can’t take too long about it, because the life of his lost love, Consuela Caswell, is at stake. She’s been sentenced to hang for the murder by poisoning of her husband’s niece and the attempted murder of her husband.
Right there we have two things which tie this story to the period it’s set in. There was still capital punishment for murder - convenient, as it happens, for writers of suspense novels - and poisoning was a very fashionable method of knocking someone off in the 1920s. (Yes, even murder is ruled by fashion – nobody ever hired hit men back then, but now they seem to be at it all the time, while poisoning’s gone right out.)
That brings us to the thorny issue of inheritance. Until the passing in 1925 of the Administration of Estates Act and the Law of Property Act, there was simply no protection for children, wives or other dependants if someone chose to leave their entire wealth to a third party. This made the changing and existence of wills, not to mention the exact timing of a testator’s death – before, during or after the drafting of a will, for instance – potentially ruinous for some and enriching for others. Plenty of grist there for the mystery writer’s mill (though alas the Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t being literal when it referred to me in a review of this novel as ‘the heir to the late Daphne du Maurier’).
We can hope, though, that Daphne would have recognized the milieu, not least because I took authenticity a step further than usual in the planning of Take no Farewell. Courtesy of Bradshaw and contemporaneous weather reports in The Times, the trains people catch are trains that actually ran and the wind, rain and sun they travel through really blew, fell or shone. The opening sentence of the novel – ‘It snowed in the night’ – is a statement of historical fact.
Welcome to 1923. It was a good year – for some.
'A master storyteller'
Independent on Sunday
'Don't, I implore you, read the last pages first, for you'll spoil the book's best surprise if you do'
Sunday Press, Dublin
'His narrative power, strength of characterisation and superb plots, plus the ability to convey the atmosphere of the period quite brilliantly, make him compelling reading'
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