Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
E C R Lorac wrote fourteen novels between Fell Murder in 1944 and Crook O’Lune in 1953 (and Fell Murder was the second she published that year), with more than a third of them featuring the Lunesdale countryside of the Lancashire fells. Relative to Poison (1947) has the area only in the background, but the rest are set where the author finally domiciled herself. Whether she is describing the rains and floods which devastate the valleys, or the birds on the bare hill tops, Lorac writes almost an adverting copy of moving to Lunesdale. In fact, that is what Gilbert Woolfall is intending to do, though in his case he is returning to the lands of his fathers after a career as a specialist bookseller in Cambridge.
Woolfall has taken a house on a hill and had it renovated, with a housekeeper to make him comfortable. Soon he will be able to return to live full-time. As we learned from earlier books life is not easy in the fells – the farming is hard, and intensive of labour and capital. There is only such much work as a hired-hand, and the best hired-hands want to marry and establish their own farms with a farmer’s wife of their own. Woolfall would not farm in his own right, but he might let someone farm his land for him, such as Jock Shearling and Betty Fell. Betty could become his housekeeper if the elderly functionary retired.
No one expected that retirement to be so permanent as it turned out to be. Another of Lorac’s books is titled Fire In The Thatch – this one could be called Fire in the Byre, for that is the cause of Maggie Herdwick’s death. And it was no accident. Fortunately, Lorac’s Inspector MacDonald has returned to the area with a view to buying a property to which he could move in his forthcoming retirement, and with the local police overwhelmed by local cases of sheep stealing, it is MacDonald who begins to investigate.
A miserable parson who feels that he receives neither the respect nor the income he deserves becomes another suspect, while genealogical and local historical investigation, as well as nights out on the fells, reveal that things had been awry in the area for a long time, even though those diversions had not been obvious. Crook O’Lune is well up to the crafty and devious standards of Lorac’s other books.
