The Books of Leo Bruce
I joked in the past that Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story, or rather gifted it a heartbeat, when secreting a spare heart from the horror genre under one of the floorboards of the locked room mystery and perhaps gave the traditional detective story its immortal quality – given how many times critics tried to sign its death certificate. So the detective story has, fittingly enough, unnatural blood and organ ties to the horror genre. You can spot the family resemblance every time the detective story
The empty, disused cellar is located underneath the old, original stone part of Falloway Hall and has an iron door with a barred opening at eye-level that has been locked for over half a century. And the key has been lost for years. What lurks behind the iron door is the proverbial skeleton in the closet of the Falloways. A 100 years ago, the third Sir Jeremy was the master of Falloway Hall who had imprisoned his wife's Spanish inamorato in the dark cellar where he taunted the gaunt, ragged prisoner for thr
Decades later, Mrs. Lavinia Falloway-Fairfax died childless and left the entire estate to her very surprised grandniece by marriage, Cherry Fairfax. She's accompanied to her new home by Aunt Margaret, " that good lady who had taken charge of Cherry when she had been orphaned ," and the family lawyer, Mr. Champion, to show them around the place. Only smudge on the place appears to be general post-war malaise of rationing and shortages of everything from food and petrol to labor. So everything appeared to be
The Books of Leo Bruce