FICTION
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A short story collection featuring Miss Marple, The Thirteen Problems (1932), provided a useful ‘recipe’ for murder suspect Roland Roussell. A copy of the thriller, left open at the first mystery, ‘The Tuesday Club Murder’, with an underlined passage on poison was found at his flat in Créances, France. The fifty-eight year-old office worker poured an eye medicine into a bottle of red wine which killed his eighty-year-old uncle, Maxime Masseron, when he opened it on Christmas Day 1977. Roussel’s aunt also consumed the potion and went into a coma. However, the arrested man told the police that the poisoning had all been a terrible accident as he had forgotten all about the bottle, which he admitted preparing the previous summer fully intending to murder a woman he believed had killed his mother.
Police were only called into investigate the incident when further casualties were admitted to hospital. The village carpenter and the victim’s son-in-law went to the old couple’s home to put the dead man in a coffin. The two men became violently ill when they helped themselves to the poisoned wine, which was still on the table. An hour later they were rendered unconscious and required emergency medical treatment before their lives were out of danger.
13
RUDYARD KIPLING
The House Surgeon
Torquay is such a place that I do desire acutely to upset by dancing through with nothing on but my spectacles.
Rudyard Kipling (1897)
The Miller family’s status in Torquay resulted in them receiving many interesting visitors at Ashfield. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, the world-famous creator of the children’s literary classics The Jungle Book and the Just So stories, and a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, young Agatha’s only recollection of this momentous event were derogatory comments made by a friend of her mother’s as to why the author had ever married his wife, Caroline Baleister, before reaching the conclusion that the couple were the ‘perfect complement to each other’.
The Kiplings had also made themselves deeply unpopular in Caroline’s hometown of Battleboro, Vermont, where the couple settled following their marriage in 1892. They left the country under a cloud after irrevocably falling out with the Baleister family. The quarrel resulted in Rudyard having his brother-in-law arrested for making violent threats, followed by a damaging court appearance and embarrassing publicity. In the autumn of 1896, the Kiplings left this bitter episode behind them and moved to England. They rented Rock House at Maidencombe, Torquay, built on a cliff overlooking a small cove. The author described the villa as ‘almost too good to be true’, and waxed lyrical about the location: ‘I look straight from my work table on to the decks of the fishing craft who come in to look after their lobster pots’. With the publication of his latest work The Seven Seas , Kipling proudly accepted an invitation to spend several days with the naval cadets based on the training ship Britannia at Dartmouth.
Kipling’s enthusiasm for his new home quickly declined as a sense of evil and brooding depression enveloped the household, which would later inspire a short ghost story entitled ‘The House Surgeon’. He revealed a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart: ‘It was the Feng-shui – the Spirit of the house itself – that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips’. For a time, the writer took up the current craze for cycling. The gossip columnist of a local paper reported, ‘I saw Mr Rudyard Kipling careering along the Tor Abbey sands on wheels one day last week’. The hobby ended when he and his wife shared pedalling duties on ‘a tandem bicycle, whose double steering-bars made good dependence for continuous domestic quarrel’. The couple crashed off their ‘devil’s toast rack’ and walked home pushing the bike they
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