Escapade

Introducing 'The Pinkerton Pair' - the cool and urbane Phil Beaumont, detective with the famous Pinkerton Agency, and Miss Jane Turner, an innocent English rose anxious to walk on the wild side of life. It is the summer of 1921 and the guests are arriving at the stately country house (haunted, of course) of Lord Purleigh in Devon; among them a Viennese psychoanalyst, a mysterious medium there to conduct the obligatory seances which were all the rage, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the great escapologist and showman Harry Houdini. Ostensibly hired to act as Houdini's bodyguard, following threats from a jealous fellow magician, Phil Beaumont finds himself casting a wise-cracking American eye over English high society whilst dealing with the energetic attentions of Lady Purleigh's daughter and having to solve the murder - in a locked room - of the wheelchair bound head of the family, the Earl of Axminster. With assistants such as Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, the case should not be difficult, though of course it is, but the one who shows the most promise could be Jane Turner? When published in the USA in 1995, the Los Angeles Times called Escapade: 'A classy and classic whodunnit?A seemingly effortless, beguiling style and a mesmerizing story smartly told.' This will be its first UK publication