Eileen Dewhurst by Martin Edwards

One of the mysteries of crime writing - indeed, of any type of writing - is why certain authors win acclaim from the outset whilst others, apparently of comparable talent, remain comparatively little known. There can be many explanations: these days, inadequate marketing is often one of the root causes. But for whatever reason, Eileen Dewhurst is an author who has not to my mind, always received her due since her first novel appeared back in 1975. She has often been warmly reviewed, and in the early 1980s it seemed as though she might be on the verge of the breakthrough which would lead to her becoming recognised as one of the leading female mystery writers. She was an established Crime Club author and her novels were equally popular in the United States. Yet although she has continued to publish roughly a book a year, celebrity has eluded her and, like many other crime novelists, she has suffered in recent years from increasingly sparse review coverage as literary fashions have changed. This is a shame, for although her work is variable in quality, that is largely because she does not write to a formula - and at her best, she is very good indeed.
Dewhurst was born in Liverpool in 1929 and educated locally before going on to read English at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She held various university administrative posts and also had a spell working for the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce before becoming a freelance writer in 1964 She contributed to a variety of newspapers and magazines, but she had a hankering to become a novelist and after writing a book which contained autobiographical elements and has never been published, she was encouraged by her agent to try a crime novel. The result was Death Came Smiling, published by Hale in 1975. The book is concerned with identical twin sisters who have very different characters; one of them investigates the murder of the other. Dewhurst's interest in the nuances of the human psyche are evident even in this early story. Looking back, she regards it as still the most "daring" in sexual terms that she has written, "because the permissive view of the 60s was still on me". The heroine's assumption of her dead twin's identity is the first of many instances of impersonation which occur in Dewhurst's work. There is also a good "least likely person" culprit.
The following year, After the Ball was published by Macmillan. It is a suspense novel rather than a detective story and it was begun in the French hill village where, years earlier, she had helped Sir William Deakin in working on his historical manuscripts. A young witness to a murder, Angela Canford, seeks to preserve her own safety by assuming a new identity. Curtain Fall (1971) was Dewhurst's first book with a seaside setting; she has long been fascinated by small holiday resort towns, especially out of the summer season. Her description of a seaside show and its singers, comedians, ventriloquists and their working lives was the fruit of research carried out with the producer and company which performed during the summer at New Brighton in the 1970s. However, the 'Linton' of the book is an imaginary place which bears little or no physical resemblance to the faded Wirral resort. Here again, the secondary mystery of the heroine's violent reactions to thoughts of her absent husband (she has blocked out her knowledge that he is dead) reflects Dewhurst's interest in the workings of the mind. The young detective Neil Carter, a subsidiary character in that book, played a more prominent part in Drink This (1980), her first to appear under the Crime Club imprint. In his earlier appearances, he was perhaps a less attractive character than later on - in Drink This it is said that, for him, jealousy could be "a reflex action". Murder is committed with poisoned Communion wine, but Dewhurst confesses to having tweaked the facts by having cyanide burn the skin in solution. Carter returned in Trio In Three Flats (1981) and fell in love with Cathy McVeigh. Dewhurst made use of her experience as a guide at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight in developing the plot in which one of the lost copies of Wedgwood's jasperware version of the Portland Vase is discovered.
Whoever I Am (1982) introduced the actress Helen Markham who returned in Playing Safe (1985). Helen is recruited by the British secret services, who wish to make use of her histrionic skills. Dewhurst regards the two books "as a species of romp, although as always the interior and emotional lives of my main characters felt important". The nursing-home setting is sensitively portrayed and the reviewer Marghanita Laski said of the setting that "the incidental realities are as terrifying as the plot".
In 1983 came one of Dewhurst's finest books, The House That Jack Built. The author had followed Coronation Street enthusiastically since it began in 1960 and when she realised that she wanted to write a novel about a teenage girl 'born' into a long-running television series role, she approached the producer of the Granada T.V. programme. Her researches paid off: this is by no means the only crime novel with a soap opera setting - Henry Slesar's Murder At Heartbreak Hospital is but one example which springs to mind - but it is possibly the best.
There Was A Little Girl (1984) begins with the wedding of Neil and Cathy Carter; their honeymoon coincides with the murder of a schoolgirl, living a double life after having been sexually abused as a child (a theme much less common thirteen years ago than today). The killer confesses, by way of a video before committing suicide. The book reflects Dewhurst's love of the New Forest, but the adult education college is modelled on Burton Manor in Wirral. Even better is A Private Prosecution (1986), set in Seaminster, a resort which Dewhurst describes as 'an inexact Llandudno transferred to the south coast." it features Humphrey Barnes, who had previously appeared in Drink This as an amateur journalist and sort of 'chorus' figure, but the most memorable character is Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Kendrick. Again, Dewhurst, was ahead of her time: one of the elements in the story anticipates a twist in Device And Desires by P. D. James.
Neil Carter reappeared in A Nice Little Business. The book appeared in the United States in 1987, three years before publication in this country, due to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the then Crime Club editor, the legendary Elizabeth Walter, for the way marriage had turned Carter into a rather bland individual. He remained quirky, though, and his decision to dress up as a woman whilst on disciplinary suspension so as to conduct a private enquiry into the murder of pregnant Cathy's dressmaker is, to say the least, difficult to swallow.
The last of Dewhurst's books to appear in the Crime Club was The Sleeper (1988) which combined a spy story with a classic closed-circle detective puzzle. Dewhurst moved to Piatkus who accepted A Nice Little Business and then published Dear Mr. Right (1991). Again Linton is the setting, this time for a novel about the perils of answering lonely hearts advertisements. Next came The Innocence Of Guilt (1991: this book was, technically, published in the United States a year earlier, but the depressing truth is that its scheduled appearance coincided with the demise of the Doubleday Crime Club and copies were, it seems, never made available to the American public.) It is one of Dewhurst's own favourites and concerns a man who is able to carry on a liaison because it is assumed by his wife and others that his mistress's husband is present when he stays at her house. Rather more striking in my view, however, is Death In Candie Gardens (1992), which benefits from an attractive setting in Guernsey. It introduces the local Detective Inspector Tim le Page and an English vet, Anna Weston. Not for the first time in Dewhurst's work - Curtain Fall is another example - there is an intriguing motive for murder. Tim and Anna reappear in Alias The Enemy (1997), a novel of romantic suspense which sees Anna menaced by an unknown adversary. Tension is maintained throughout although the culprit's motivation proves to be disappointingly irrational.
Dewhurst has never been afraid to experiment and Now You See Her (1995) saw her not only joining forces with yet another new publisher (Severn House) but also introducing a new amateur detective - Phyllida Moon, who like Helen Markham (later Johnson), is an actress who uses her flair for impersonation in the service of detection. Phyllida returns in The Verdict On Winter (1996), as does Maurice Kendrick from A Private Prosecution. The book is informed by Dewhurst's cultural knowledge: 'Everything I wrote about the painter Frederick Sandys is true - he was a friend of D.G. Rossetti and on the fringes of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and by the end of the book we are left with the facts: Sandys painted 'Autumn' as described, and did a sketch for 'Spring' which was never worked up into a painting."
In addition to her steady output of novels, Dewhurst has written occasional short stories, three of which have appeared in anthologies I have edited. 'The Good Old Days" and 'A Tour Too Far" are to be found in the Northern Blood collections, but even better is 'The Secret', one of the cleverest of Dewhurst's many treatments of impersonation, from Perfectly Criminal.
Few, if any, contemporary crime novelists can be as preoccupied as Dewhurst with questions of identity. The author herself is, if by no means a mysterious figure, certainly retiring and reluctant to attend high profile events such as Bouchercon. Perhaps that, together with too regular changes of publisher, accounts in part for her failure to achieve the recognition that her friends and admirers, of whom I am one, would claim she deserves. But it may not be too late. She is a writer of distinct talent and still only a little older than was Ellis Peters when the first Brother Cadfael novel appeared. And look what happened to her.

Article originally appeared in CADS and is reprinted with kind permission of Geoff Bradley and the author
BIBLIOGRAPHY of Eileen Dewhurst