Writers Tricks of the Trade Vol. 6 Issue 1 | Page 27

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Surprise Murder Mystery Hit (Cont’d)

“His plotting is good and he is not bad at thumbnail character sketches. But
my mother thought they were just a distraction, I think, as she was bringing me
and my younger brother up.”
Dr Brown, who lives in Reigate, Surrey, said she only recently began reading
her father’s novels. She realized there was an interest in her father’s identity when
Murder for Christmas was reissued in 2015 along with an appeal for information. No
one knew the actual name of the author.
Underhill’s daughter had no idea the book was being republished until her
brother, Derek, spotted a copy in his local Waterstones. When she saw the appeal
for information about the author, she got in touch with the publishers.
Dr. Brown says she does feel guilty she was not more interested at the time.
Before her father died he gave her a complete set of his books, some of them
signed.

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She said, “I picked one up soon afterwards and thought this is not for me. I
didn’t want to read on, because I didn’t want to feel negative. They were just
gathering dust upstairs.”
She has waited to see if there are any plans to republish his other murder
titles.
Very little was known about the author Francis Duncan before Dr Brown
stepped forward. His publisher, Vintage Books, had no biographical details and
knew only that he wrote a series of murder mysteries in the 1930s, 1940s and
1950s.
In Murder for Christmas, the novel’s sleuth Mordecai Tremaine is invited to
spend Christmas in the snowy village of Sherbroome, the country retreat of a
wealthy friend.
But the party soon ends when the corpse of a man who looks like Father
Christmas is found among the gifts.

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The 1949 novel was reissued by Vintage Books, part of the Random House
group, in 2015.

Stranger things have happened, but this is a case of success revisited and a
real life mystery solved.

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WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE

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JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016