Marjorie Eccles - Page 1
First British Edition Allison & Busby (2004) |
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The Shape of Sand
Life at Charnley was blessed, or at least so it seemed to the Jardine children, living in the idyllic Edwardian country manor house with their loving parents, Beatrice and Amory, where nothing could encroach upon their happiness. But one night, after a party celebrating their mother’s birthday, their dreams of a propitious future suddenly came crashing down when a family scandal catapulted them into the headlines.
Nearly four decades have passed and the Second World War has just been won, but still the exact events of that fateful night remain unknown. However, when builders working on Charnley uncover a shoebox stuffed full of old letters, photographs and a diary, it finally seems as though some of the answers are within reach.
The clue to unravelling the affair lies in a voyage to Egypt undertaken by Beatrice eleven years before her disappearance. With the help of her diary written at that time, Beatrice’s three daughters, Harriet, Vita and Daisy, set about uncovering the truth. But then the mummified body of a brutally murdered woman is discovered in the ruins of their old home and a whole new set of questions need to he asked.
Beautifully written, evoking the life of the Edwardian upper classes, bomb-scarred, post-war England and the sultry Egyptian landscape, The Shape of Sand is a compelling novel you will wish was as long as the Nile.
'Ms Eccles is one of the stalwarts of British crime fiction' Susannah Yager, Sunday Telegraph
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First British Edition Hale (2003) |
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Account Rendered and other Stories
Here are twelve stories, with locations as far apart as Cairo, Vienna, Armenia, South Africa and Great Britain. They have different time scales, spanning the years from 1900 to the present day, through two world wars and with varying themes of love and hate, jealousy and revenge.
A death occurs in Mafeking during its famous siege. The dark perils of impending retirement loom for an elderly couple. A tranquil Scottish loch is the scene of a tragedy, and a garden created in the arid climate of Egypt incites hatred. A country house hides its secrets. A valuable Expressionist painting disappears, and Vienna is seen through an unusual perspective. Old scores are settled and personal animosities and wrongs are well remembered.
One theme unites them all - murder.
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First British Edition Constable & Robinson (2002) |
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Killing a Unicorn
A family with secrets -is murder one of them?
On a high bluff overlooking rolling chalk upland stands Membery Pace, for over one hundred years the home of the Calvert family. Below it, set in a forest clearing, is a modern, award-winning house designed by architect Mark Calvert, one of Alyssa Culvert’s three sons.
Mark’s wife, Francesca, has been conscious of an intriguing element of mystery about Bianca Morgan ever since Chip, the eldest Culvert brother, brought her and her child to live with him at Membery. No one, except possibly Chip, knows anything about her previous life. Bianca remains an enigma - and then one day her body is found in a pool beneath a waterfall on the estate.
The three brothers have always been very close, but the subsequent enquiry now reveals that they all had their own secret connection with Bianca. Could one of them have had reason to kill her? Jonathan to save his career as an international cello soloist, Mark to save his marriage - or even Chip?
And then the focus of the enquiry shifts dramatically when Bianca’s nine-year-old son goes missing. Has the child too been killed, or has he been abducted because he saw his mother’s murder? The fruitless search for Bianca’s killer and the kidnapper forces Francesca to take matters into her own hands, determined to resolve the mystery of the Culvert family.
'Ms Eccles is one of the stalwarts of British crime fiction' Susannah Yager, Sunday Telegraph
`[Eccles] would get the police seal of approval for her attention to detail: Northern Echo
'Eccles' lucid narrative and tension-building skills provide an intriguing outing for procedural fans' Kirkus Reviews (A Death of Distinction)
'Another crime cracker from Eccles, who would get the police seal of approval for her attention to detail' Northern Echo (An Accidental Shroud)
‘Neatly put together, with a sound plot, well written ...this is a good example of the regional police novel’ T J. Binyon, Evening Standard (An Accidental Shroud)
`Eccles’s police procedurals are superior specimens, with well-developed relationships among the police officers’ Publishers Weekly (More Deaths Than One)
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First British Edition Constable (2001) |
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Untimely Graves
When the murdered body of a woman is found floating in flooded uplands near an isolated farm and nearby cottage, it poses problems of identification, prompting the press to dub her the `Mystery Woman’.
Who is she? As time goes by, Detective Superintendent Gil Mayo and his assistant Inspector Abigail Moon, begin to fear that question is destined to remain unanswered, until the bursar of a public school, currently involved in controversy over a proposed new entrance to the school, is murdered at his desk. Though the murders are seemingly unrelated, events begin to show that this is not so.
As a temporarily unemployed ex-student, Cleo Atkins will do anything rather than take the safe secretarial position her mother has lined up for her, even to taking a job with Maid to Order, a firm of cleaning contractors, something her mother feels she is singularly unfitted for. The firm is much in demand following the trail of destruction left by the floods, and working with the team Cleo comes across evidence from a totally unexpected source, and ultimately finds herself involved in the investigation.
With her cooperation, Mayo and Moon are able to follow a chain of events that eventually lead to the identity of the Mystery Woman being revealed, and to the unexpected solution of both murders.
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First British Edition Constable & Robinson (2000) |
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Hardback
Thomas Dunne Books (American) |
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A Sunset Touch
The twelfth novel in Marjorie Eccles' popular crime series featuring Superintendent Gil Mayo and Inspector Abigail Moon.
The house was beyond hope of saving by the time the fire brigade arrived… [The fireman] cast a look back at the raging inferno. Kids in there? Not now, there weren’t. Not alive. No chance.
For one terrible moment it seems that the house fire on Bessemer Street has taken the lives of two young Polish children. However, when the fire brigade conducts their gruesome search of the building, they discover a man’s body. Even more disturbing are the definite signs of arson they find. When the forensic report confirms foul play, Detective Superintendent Gil Mayo assigns the case to his young colleague, Abigail Moon.
Meanwhile, Inspector Martin Kite, recently returned to Lavenstock, looks into a brutal attack on vicar Haldane’s elderly wife. She is lying in a coma and Kite feels that he might soon be investigating a murder. The only evidence Kite has is that someone had been visiting Mrs. Haldane before she was attacked and that nothing was stolen from the vicarage. Was the attack a random act of violence or a deliberate act of vengeance?
DS Mayo is frustrated at the lack of progress his detectives are making and it’s not until a stolen art treasure leads them both down the same path, one which takes them from Poland to wartime England to the present day, that the key to the danger can be unlocked.
‘A book that has an award-winning way with cold, gray, foggy and rainy February weather.’
Houston Chronicle on Killing Me Softly
‘[Eccles’s] elegant prose credibly links her three disparate plots of drugs; murder, and kidnapping to create a vivid picture of small-town interactions.’ Publishers Weekly on Killing Me Softly
‘It all makes for lively entertainment, enhanced by the author’s forthright style, some resonant characters, a subdued village ambiance, and a puzzle neatly deconstructed with . . . help from Lavenstock’s likable police team.’ Kirkus Reviews on An Accidental Shroud
About The Author
Marjorie Eccles spent her childhood in Yorkshire and on the Northumbrian coast, where the urge to write first gripped her. Her writing career only began seriously much later, however, when she started writing short stories and suspense novels, written under a pseudonym, all of which were also serialized in women’s magazines.
When she subsequently turned to crime and began writing the Gil Mayo Mystery series, featuring Superintendent Mayo and his assistant, Inspector Abigail Moon, she chose to set them in a small town on the edge of the Black Country. ‘I lived there for over thirty years and came to know and love the area and to admire the character of the people who lived there, so it seemed quite natural to use it as a setting for my new series. The town I use may have a fictional name, Lavenstock, but it is in reality an amalgam of several places in the Midlands where I have lived.’
Her first crime novel in the Mayo series was published in the USA in 1988 and has recently been republished over here by Constable. In between there have been thirteen more, and two non-series books, one of which, Echoes Of Silence, is set in her native Yorkshire.
Short stories were the first things she ever wrote, and remain her first love, and many of her crime stories use the unusual places abroad which she visited when she travelled extensively with her husband on business. These stories are published in magazines and also in collections such as The Crime Writers’ Association annual anthology. In America they can be found in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the Malice Domestic anthologies and others. In 1998, she was awarded the Malice Domestic Agatha Christie Short Story Styles Award.
She has one grown up son and one grandson, and now lives with her husband in a small village on the edge of the Chilterns, and writes full time. ‘I love reading and listening to music,’ she says, ‘and gardening, which is a particular passion of mine when I can find time - just as well, since we have a large garden and no help’
Her latest book, Killing A Unicorn, which is a non-series, is published by Constable in September 2002. Untimely Graves and Echoes Of Silence will shortly be published by St Martin’s Press in the U.S.A.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
The Shape of Sand
(Allison & Busby,
2004)
Jun 04
Account Rendered and other Stories
(Hale,
2003)
Killing a Unicorn
(Constable & Robinson,
2002)
Untimely Graves
(Constable,
2001)
(Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
A Sunset Touch
(Constable & Robinson,
2000)
(Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
Echoes of Silence
(Constable,
2000)
The Superintendent's Daughter
(Constable,
1999)
(Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
Cast a Cold Eye
(Constable,
1999)
1st published in America by Doubleday 1988 (Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
Killing Me Softly
(Constable,
1998)
A Species of Revenge
(HarperCollins,
1996)
(Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
A Death of Distinction
(Collins,
1995)
An Accidental Shroud
(Collins,
1994)
The Company She Kept
(Collins Crime Club,
1993)
Late of This Parish
(Collins Crime Club,
1992)
More Deaths than One
(Collins,
1991)
Requiem for a Dove
(Collins,
1990)
Doubleday (American) 1991
(Gil Mayo & Abigail Moon)
Death of a Good Woman
(Collins,
1989)
The Shape of Sand
by Marjorie Eccles
