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After using Arthur Conan Doyle in her debut novel Violet Hill , Henrietta McKervey invokes another famous writer from slightly earlier in A Talented Man , but there also a hint of another great crime writer in that title. Although not quite the same as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, there is indeed a young man in McKervey’s period crime fiction who impersonates another person and embarks on a spree of fraud and deception with the aim of enjoying a life of ease on the continent. In the case of Ellis Spender however, the deception is far more ambitious and requires no small amount of talent turned towards twisted ends; he intends to impersonate Bram Stoker, no less, the author of Dracula . A Talented Man is set in the mid 1930s, where the world is on the brink of an unthinkable new world war and the formerly wealthy middle classes are starting to see a change in their fortunes. Ellis Spender is frustrated by his lack of success as a budding novelist and dissatisfied with his home circ...

There are two detective stories in Henrietta McKervey’s Violet Hill , both in and around the same locations but set 100 years apart. The obvious question you will be looking an answers to – aside from the solving of both mysteries – is what do the two stories have in common and what is the purpose in bringing them together; is it just to contrast police investigation methods and what the respective cases tell us about the society they are set in or is there some other purpose? There’s also a little bit of a supernatural element brought into proceedings in Violet Hill and some connections that seem a little forced, but it’s not so much to suggest that there are some mystical forces at work as much as add a layer of historical perspective onto proceedings that we wouldn’t normally consider. One of the investigations, which you might think is at least the main case in terms of precedence (and title, of course), takes place in late 1918 and early 1919 in London. Rather unusually for this ...