Marilyn's Musings

The setting of my new book, The Corpse at the Crystal Palace (23rd in the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series) was once for many years a prominent London landmark. Built in 1851, entirely of glass and steel, for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, it was disassembled a year later and rebuilt on a hill in South London. Its demise in 1936 in a huge fire was by all accounts spectacular. If you go there today there is nothing to see but the foundation. Except, that is, the monsters at the southwest corner of the extensive gardens. The monsters are the creation of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. A naturalist and sculptor, he was commissioned by the Crystal Palace Company to create lifesize statues of some of the prehistoric beasts whose bones were then being dug up and studied in ever increasing numbers. He went to Richard Owen, the great scientist, for the latest theories of what they might have looked like when alive. Hawkins built in concrete on a massive scale, to match t...

Cornwall has been a mysterious place since the Phoenicians sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules to buy tin and gold from the misty land of rugged cliffs, moors, and hidden harbours. Until the advent of modern transportation, the easiest access was by sea, and that was by no means easy as thousands of shipwrecks attest. It was a haven for smugglers and wreckers. My first visit to Cornwall was at the age of eight. My godmother rented a field from a farmer and parked a caravan, high on a hillside looking west over the Atlantic between two rocky headlands, Cambeak and Penkenna. We stayed there every summer and many Easter holidays for a couple of decades. From there we explored the North Coast, the sandy coves, fishing villages, and Bodmin Moor, now the setting of my Cornish mysteries. In the meantime, my sister moved to the southern side of the duchy, to a minuscule hamlet on the River Tamar, north of Plymouth. Just upstream is Cotehele, a medieval fortified manor ...

  When I first proposed the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series to my agent, I'd chosen my period (1920s), my setting (England), and my protagonist (Daisy). I had decided Daisy would be of an aristocratic family, so she could question a duke about why he was in the library at the stroke of midnight, but impoverished, so she had to work for a living. And I made her a journalist to give her an excuse for finding bodies all over the country, thus avoiding St. Mary's Mead/Cabot Cove syndrome. In Heirs of the Body (just out in paperback), for instance, she's staying at her family's estate in Worcestershire. Beyond that, all I knew was that I didn't want to have to think up titles. I had already written over 20 Regencies and I was tired of coming up with good, eye-catching, memorable titles. I decided my series would be Death in January, Death in February, Death in March, etc. Each plot would be related to the month. Thus the first would have a body in ...

  Hello, folks. Thanks to Marilyn for inviting me. This being the twenty-first mystery in the Daisy Dalrymple series, I feel as if Daisy has come of age. When I started, with Death at Wentwater Court , she was twenty-five, unmarried, hoping to scratch out a living with her writing. Over 21 books, she's aged by four years and acquired a Scotland Yard detective for a husband, along with a stepdaughter and twin babies.     Looking back... She still writes articles for UK and US magazines, but owing to a lucky inheritance, that's just spending money now.   Daisy and DCI Alec Fletcher have travelled all over England, across the Atlantic by ocean liner, andacross America in a biplane, finding suspicious bodies wherever they go.   The books have been published in English in the US, UK, and worldwide, in hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, and audio. There have been German translations, and most recently Polish. ...

Catching up with myself... by Carola Dunn , author of the Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries       I started writing 34 years ago. Not that I ever had a burning desire to produce a book, but it seemed like a good excuse to postpone looking for a "proper" job (as opposed to my many part-time and temp work experiences). I had been rereading Georgette Heyer's Regencies. and wishing for some new ones equally good. The ones I found were pretty badly written—yet they'd been published. Surely, I thought, I can do at least as well. So I sat down (at the kitchen table) and wrote my first Regency romance, longhand, on ruled paper. The first surprise was that I finished it. The second, that an editor wanted to buy it.     Toblethorpe Manor has the requisite English setting and youthful heroine (in her mid 20s in this case). They say write what you know. Well, I was born and grew up in England, and way back then it wasn't so long since I was in my ...