Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery by Benedict Brown (simple ebook reader txt) 📕

2 dashes Fernet-Branca

A dash of fresh orange juice

And orange peel to garnish

The cocktail was created by Ada ‘Coley’ Coleman, the first female head bartender at the Savoy Hotel in London’s famous American Bar. During her twenty-two-year tenure from 1903 to 1925, she served countless famous figures including Mark Twain, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin and the Prince of Wales, and estimated that she had served one hundred thousand customers and poured one million drinks by the time she retired.

The Hanky-Panky itself was created for the actor Charles Hawtrey. When Coleman whipped him up the drink one night, he described it as “the real hanky-panky” and the name stuck.

A word of warning, if you go to the Savoy and order the vintage Hanky-Panky, it costs an eye-watering £120 ($165). Ouch!

Acknowledgements

It turns out that writing and researching a historical novel takes rather a lot of effort. So many people have helped me get the tone, plot and language right for this book and I’ve spent months with my head in an old dictionary or searching through etymological websites. So a big thank you to Douglas Harper who started etymonline.com and Jonathon Green for creating greensdictofslang.com. Both are invaluable and truly fascinating resources and I love learning about language and its mysterious roots and routes.

Thank you as always to my wife and daughter for inspiring me and giving me a reason to write, to my family for reading my books and my crack team of experts – the Hoggs and the Martins (fiction), Paul Bickley (policing), Karen Baugh Menuhin (marketing) and Mar Pérez (forensic pathology) for knowing lots of stuff when I don’t. Thanks to my fellow writers who are always there for me, especially Pete, Suzanne, Rose and my friend Lucy Middlemass, who taught me so much over many years.

Thank you, many times over to all the readers in my ARC team who have sought out every last anachronistic word and typo that I missed. I really couldn’t do it without you. I hope you’ll stick with me, Izzy and Lord Edgington to see what happens next…

Rebecca Brooks, James Woodworth, Ferne Miller, John Vaudrey, Craig Jones, Melinda Kimlinger, Deborah McNeill, Emma James, Mindy Denkin, Namoi Lamont, Katharine Reibig, Linsey Neale, Sarah Brown, Karen Davis, Taylor Rain, Brenda, Christine Folks McGraw, Terri Roller, Margaret Liddle, Esther Lamin, Tracy Humphries, Lori Willis, Anja Peerdeman, Liz Batton, Allie Copland, Kate Newnham, Marion Davis, Adelia Hammond, Tiana Hammond, Tina Laws, Sarah Turner, Linda Brain, Stephanie Keller, Linda Locke, Kathryn Davenport, Another Kat, Barb Hackel, Sandra Hoff, Karen M, Mary Nickell, Vanessa Rivington, Darlene Riggs and my mum, Laraine.

If you’re looking for a modern murder mystery series with just as many off-the-wall characters but a little more edge, try “The Izzy Palmer Mysteries” for your next whodunit fix.

“A CORPSE CALLED BOB” (BOOK ONE)

Izzy just found her horrible boss murdered in his office and all her dreams are about to come true! Miss Marple meets Bridget Jones in a fast and funny new detective series with a hilarious cast of characters and a wicked resolution you’ll never see coming. Read now to discover why one Amazon reviewer called it, “Sheer murder mystery bliss.”

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Check out the complete Izzy Palmer Collection here

About Me

Writing has always been my passion. It was my favourite half-an-hour a week at primary school, and I started on my first, truly abysmal book as a teenager. So it wasn’t a difficult decision to study literature at university which led to a masters in Creative Writing.

I’m a Welsh-Irish-Englishman originally from South London but now living with my French/Spanish wife and presumably quite confused infant daughter in Burgos, a beautiful mediaeval city in the north of Spain. I write overlooking the Castilian countryside, trying not to be distracted by the vultures, hawks and red kites that fly past my window each day.

When Covid 19 hit in 2020, the language school where I worked as an English teacher closed down and I became a full-time writer. I have two murder mystery series. There are already six books written in The Izzy Palmer Mysteries which is a more modern, zany take on the genre. I will continue to alternate releases between Izzy and Lord Edgington. I hope to release at least ten books in each series.

I previously spent years focussing on kids’ books and wrote everything from fairy tales to environmental dystopian fantasies, right through to issue-based teen fiction. My book The Princess and The Peach was long-listed for the Chicken House prize in The Times and an American producer even talked about adapting it into a film. I’ll be slowly publishing those books over the next year whenever we find the time.

“Murder at the Spring Ball” is the first book in the “Lord Edgington Investigates…” series. I’m about to start work on the second novel and there’s a novella available free if you sign up to my reader’s club. If you feel like telling me what you think about Chrissy and his grandfather, my writing or the world at large, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to get in touch via...

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