Mark Henwick's Blog - Posts Tagged "murder"
New book...
A new book.
Only cheating a little. The book is So Many Doors. It's a murder mystery set in an isolated outpost in Northern Rhodesia during colonial times. It was written by my late mother, Eileen Marguerite Henwick, in 1964.
It wasn't previously published and came to us as typewritten foolscap pages in a green binder. My sister got it onto computer and I edited it.
It is the hardest writerly thing to edit someone else's work. Half the time, I wanted to take the story in my direction. Of course, that wasn't the purpose, so I reined that in. The other difficulty was that the language of the 1960s, and the structure of novels then, wasn't what it is now. So I culled some phrases and old-fashioned punctuation and broke the book up into smaller, single scene chapters.
I think I've done it justice, and it is a very good murder story, using the isolation of the small community to raise the stakes in the hunt for the real murderer.
Here's the link and blurb:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CXRLG6L/
It’s October, 1948. Northern Rhodesia.
Having displeased his superiors, colonial officer James Lancaster is sent to Feira in the sweltering Zambezi valley, where he’s to replace the outgoing District Commissioner, Barnaby Drayton.
He’s been warned to keep his reports dull and unexceptional if he habours any hope for a better posting. There seems little chance of that: he arrives on the day Drayton’s wife dies, and he finds a tiny community torn apart with suspicion and hate.
The thermometer keeps rising, the rains hold off, tempers flare.
Father Bravachko and the clinic nurse say Elizabeth Drayton died of natural causes. The drums, muttering in the fevered nights, speak of a witchdoctor’s revenge.
Or is there a cold-blooded murderer on this remote and isolated station?
Only cheating a little. The book is So Many Doors. It's a murder mystery set in an isolated outpost in Northern Rhodesia during colonial times. It was written by my late mother, Eileen Marguerite Henwick, in 1964.
It wasn't previously published and came to us as typewritten foolscap pages in a green binder. My sister got it onto computer and I edited it.
It is the hardest writerly thing to edit someone else's work. Half the time, I wanted to take the story in my direction. Of course, that wasn't the purpose, so I reined that in. The other difficulty was that the language of the 1960s, and the structure of novels then, wasn't what it is now. So I culled some phrases and old-fashioned punctuation and broke the book up into smaller, single scene chapters.
I think I've done it justice, and it is a very good murder story, using the isolation of the small community to raise the stakes in the hunt for the real murderer.
Here's the link and blurb:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CXRLG6L/
It’s October, 1948. Northern Rhodesia.
Having displeased his superiors, colonial officer James Lancaster is sent to Feira in the sweltering Zambezi valley, where he’s to replace the outgoing District Commissioner, Barnaby Drayton.
He’s been warned to keep his reports dull and unexceptional if he habours any hope for a better posting. There seems little chance of that: he arrives on the day Drayton’s wife dies, and he finds a tiny community torn apart with suspicion and hate.
The thermometer keeps rising, the rains hold off, tempers flare.
Father Bravachko and the clinic nurse say Elizabeth Drayton died of natural causes. The drums, muttering in the fevered nights, speak of a witchdoctor’s revenge.
Or is there a cold-blooded murderer on this remote and isolated station?
