A Death in Diamonds полностью

Readers of the same vintage as me may have grown up with the Jennings stories of Anthony Buckeridge. Long before the days of Harry Potter, they recounted the adventures of a (very non-magical) boy at a British boarding school. Growing up far away in Hong Kong at the time, I devoured them. And so, I have borrowed the names of Jennings’s friends Darbishire (spelled this way) and Venables, in honour of the real Chief Inspector George Jennings of the Kensington division, whose team solved the Rillington Place Murders in the 1950s. His subordinate, Inspector James Black, successfully led the early part of the investigation and it is in Black’s honour that Darbishire is a mere DI, but the relationship between my inspector and Venables does not reflect the far more respectful one between the real Metropolitan Police officers.

As I researched the Special Operations Executive, and also murders in and around Chelsea and Kensington in the 1950s, I discovered that two female wartime heroines were murdered there, one by a stalker, one unsolved. The first was Krystyna Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, a Polish agent in the SOE with an extraordinary war record, who was reduced to menial jobs afterwards, before being killed in Earl’s Court in 1952 by a jealous man who had worked as a fellow steward on an ocean liner. The second was Teresa Lubienska, a seventy-three-year-old Polish countess who had been in the Polish Underground Army and survived two concentration camps, and was stabbed by an unknown assailant at Gloucester Road tube station in 1957. Both should have been hailed as heroes. Instead, they led difficult post-war lives and only now is their heroism being fully appreciated, as female historians and writers take on the task of bringing to light what they did. I learned a lot from Mission France by Kate Vigurs, first published in 2022.

The tale of the fictional Marianne Fleury was inspired by my reading of Miss Dior, by Justine Picardie, first published in 2021, which tells the extraordinary story of Christian Dior’s sister Catherine. She was a young Resistance fighter, captured and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp from Paris. She returned after the war, almost unrecognisable after all she had suffered, but continued as her brother’s muse and became a successful rose farmer in Provence, whose flowers were used in his perfumes. Christian died in the time frame of this book, in 1957, but Catherine died in 2008, at the age of ninety. Justine’s book captures the joy and terror of those war and post-war years. It also describes the importance of couture fashion in the rebuilding of post-war France. I recommend it.

S.J. Bennett, August 2023

As always, I must thank the late Queen Elizabeth II for a life of service, a sense of fun, and for preserving the mystery of the monarchy enough to let a novelist imagine this secret fictional string to her bow.

I have been lucky to see this series, like the Queen, travel around the world, and I want to take this chance to thank Sam Edenborough, the team at ILA and all my editors, translators and marketing teams in countries from France and Germany to Australia and Japan. It’s a privilege to see your support for the stories and the wonderful covers you give every book.

At home, I’m ever grateful to Ben Willis at Bonnier Zaffre, who is the best editor I could possibly hope for. Thank you, too, to Nick Stearn for the covers, to Iker Ayesteran for the wonderful illustrations (especially the corgis), to Isabella Boyne for making everything run more smoothly than I have any right to ask, and to Elinor Fewster for making sure people know about the books.

Charlie Campbell at Greyhound Literary remains the best agent in the business. I still feel as lucky as I did when we started out together in 2020. And here we are, four books down the line.

The Transatlantics: thank you for all your encouragement and sage advice. Bonnie MacBird, you are a great Sherlockian and a treasured friend. Vanessa Harbour, I couldn’t have done it without you this time; those Friday morning crit sessions were times well spent.

To all the writers in the crime community, thank you for being such a supportive and creative bunch. Especially Vaseem Khan, for your generous encouragement, and Ruth Ware, for being the ideal person to bounce ideas off if somebody needs to be killed in a way a police pathologist might not be able to reconstruct. Don’t get on Ruth’s bad side, is all I can say.