As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackout, people are understandably jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, who’s been working in Vienna for a Jewish family, returns home with no job and a broken heart. She answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript […]
Madame Matisse by Sophie Haydock
This is the story of three women — one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a […]
The ultimatum that changed Matisse for ever
Seething passion and scandal are absent from most accounts of Henri Matisse, says Sophie Haydock, author of Madame Matisse. Yet, after four decades of devoted marriage, his wife issued an ultimatum that changed everything. Here Sophie writes about the three woman in Matisse’s life. Henri Matisse was 69 years old when his wife, Amélie – […]
The Red Hollow by Natalie Marlow
Warwickshire, 1934, and deep in a hamlet in the Warwickshire countryside, Red Hollow Hall is a male-only sanatorium run by the charismatic psychiatrist Dr Moon. However, all is not well, and Dr Moon’s patients are leaving Red Hollow in droves. Recent disturbances, which originally appeared to be pranks, have descended into something more sinister, and […]
Review: After The Flood by Alec Marsh
Mark Ellis reviews Alec Marsh’s After The Flood and finds it “excellent and gripping”. Read on to see what he enjoyed so much. After The Flood is the fourth of Alec Marsh’s imaginative 1930s ripping yarns featuring the unlikely heroic duo of Drabble and Harris. I very much enjoyed the first three books as I […]
Night Climbing by Sarah Day
When Sylvia’s son, Cyril, vanishes during a perilous school trek in the German mountains, her world crumbles. A pre-trip postcard from Cyril hints that his teacher – now lauded for his rescue efforts – knew more about the stormy conditions than he has admitted. Sylvia shifts from frantic mother to justice seeker. Meanwhile in Hofsgrund, […]
Ten Years After by TA Belshaw
A derelict, long-abandoned cottage has lain undisturbed in the woods for almost half a century. Known to the local children as Creepy Cottage, its reputation means that even the toughest of the local kids keep away from its boundaries. Years before, as the children’s skipping rhyme recalls, a young boy had gone in through a […]
Red brick women: 1930s university pioneers
What was life like at university for the pioneering women who went to a red brick institution in the 1930s? Lizzie Bentham, who writes mysteries set against this background, draws on family experiences to explain. Each autumn, thousands of students will begin studying at so-called red brick universities, the nine civic universities founded in the […]