Foreword

Foreword. Or should it be a preface, or even a prologue. And does it matter? Probably not.

One or two things need an explanation. The plot is from an Agatha Christie Novel, Murder is Easy which is pure whodunit. Plagiarism? No, there is very little resemblance between this and that, even the plot is altered, it was just a starting point. Is the murderer the same person? Well you’ll have to read both.

It is, of course, very common for a writer to take and original story and update it, think West Side Story which is a pretty straight lift of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, although there was no music in that. Now the interesting thing about that is that when Leonard Bernstein came to Britain to stage it here he was appalled to find that the big hit in London was a musical about a magic piano. How could the British want to watch such a thing when he had a masterpiece to stage? What he missed was that the British had had large quantities of high explosive dropped on them for a few years, and an escape into magic was, well, an escape.

The action for my story is set sometime between 1780 and 1850 in southern England, but it really doesn’t overly matter, and even those dates have an ‘ish’ to them ... The major problem I had was in the forms of address, particularly for women. So what I have done is used Mistress for older women and married women, and Miss for younger unmarried ones. Master seems to be adequate for all the men except of course for baronets. Actually there is only one of those. And doctors of course.

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