The long hot summer of '76. Despite everything we hear about the swinging sixties, sexual liberation didn't even reach the end of the drive up to the door of Loxford Hall, the medium ranked girls public school to which my parents had sent me. Loxford Hall: a big Victorian redbrick building, set in its own grounds, or demesne, in the middle of the Derbyshire hills. Cold, isolated, perhaps romantic in a strange Gothic Horror way. A school typical of finishing schools in 1976. Unheated, cold baths, miserable food, second rate teaching and governed by a group of frustrated harpies keeping order by the use of a host of more than condign punishments. I was sent there at the start of the summer holidays when it would have been expected that we girls would be spending a few happy weeks away from school with their families. But my family was no ordinary family, my parents were separated and my mother had gone to live with 'Uncle' Emil on the Riviera. Father was in the ...
Mystery Weekend I put down my copy of 'Murder in the Library' and gave a sigh. It hadn't been the butler. I was sure it would have been, but it turned out that Sir Graham Forbes was really The Honorable Cynthia Smythe in disguise and she was really the love child of Edith Blogg the cook. Well who would have guessed it? Well the dashing Roderick Storm of course. He solved all the murders. Although he really hated doing it as the murderer would be hanged and plead for mercy and Roderick was a gentle soul beneath. Gentle but with a will of iron. The murderer was always carted off in cuffs. I got ready to go into the library where I was assistant librarian. Not for the first time I wished I lived back in the old days, when murders were only committed in detective stories and films were all in black and white. Nice romantic comedies in black and white set in old country houses. I particularly liked i...