Curtain Fall

Eileen Dewhurst

Dec 2012 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

Joanna Stuart had once seen the window of a seaside hotel room when driving past with her husband. Its offer of peace and independence stayed with her and several years later, at a crisis point in her life, she compulsively returns to ‘the Window’. But she fails to find the expected tranquillity and isolation. Instead she becomes involved with the cast of the resort’s summer variety show, whose leading lady has recently been murdered. A member of the cast is obviously the murderer and a cloud of suspicion hangs over the tight-knit and loyal community.

Baffled by lack of motive and frustrated by lack of progress, Detective Inspector Carter persuades Joanna to take advantage of the friendship offered to her by the players and helps him penetrate their closed ranks. Feeling a little treacherous she nevertheless comes to enjoy her role of amateur detective, and her strong involvement with the players helps her to shut out her own problems.

During the last weeks of the glorious summer she gradually sees the pattern of the murder take shape, but it isn’t until she witnesses a reconstruction of the crime that the identity of the killer emerges, and Joanna’s own problems also become clarified. This is a subtle and fairly-clued whodunnit, full of character and movement and with a stunning climax which does not disappoint.

About the author

An only child, Eileen Dewhurst was self-sufficient and bookish from an early age, preferring solitude or one-to-one contacts to groups, and hating sport. Her first attempts at writing were not auspicious. At 14, a would-be family saga was aborted by an uncle discovering it and quoting from it choked with laughter. A second setback came a few years later at school, when a purple passage was returned with the words 'Cut this cackle!' written across it in red ink: a chastening lesson in how embellishments can weaken rather than strengthen one’s message.

Eileen read English at Oxford, and afterwards spent some unmemorable years in 'Admin' before breaking free and dividing her life in two: winters in London doing temporary jobs to earn money and experience, summers at home as a freelance journalist, spinning 'think pieces' for the Liverpool Daily Post and any other publications that would take them, and reporting on food and fashion for the long defunct Illustrated Liverpool News, as well as writing a few plays.

Her first sustained piece of writing was a fantasy for children which was never published but secured an agent. Her Great Autobiographical Novel was never published either, although damned with faint praise and leading to an attempt at crime writing that worked: over the next thirty years she produced almost a book a year and also published some short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Eileen has always written from an ironic stance, never allowing her favourite characters to take themselves too seriously: a banana skin is ever lurking.