Fire in the Thatch

The novel is set in South Devon in the last year of the Second World War. Colonel St Cyres, a landowner and farmer of Devon Cattle, rents a thatched cottage on his estate to a new tenant. Recently discharged from the Navy the new arrival plans to operate as a market gardener. This is greatly to the annoyance of his daughter-in-law June, a spoilt Mayfair woman living with him while her husband is in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. June had hoped that her friend Tommy Gressingham would take the property, as part of his plans to build a luxury hotel on the site. When the new tenant is found dead in the burned-out cottage, MacDonald is called in from Scotland Yard to investigate the possibility of murder.

• Cooper, John & Pike, B.A. Artists in Crime: An Illustrated Survey of Crime Fiction First Edition Dustwrappers, 1920-1970. Scolar Press, 1995.
• Hubin, Allen J. Crime Fiction, 1749-1980: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Garland Publishing, 1984.
• Nichols, Victoria & Thompson, Susan. Silk Stalkings: More Women Write of Murder. Scarecrow Press, 1998.
• Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.

This article about a 1940s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page.

• v
• t
• e