Forgotten Book - The Pretty Ones

Dorothy Eden was a New Zealander who made her home in England in order to develop her career as a writer. It turned out to be a good move, as she became a bestselling author, primarily in the field of Gothic thrillers with a romantic streak. She strikes me as a sort of literary descendant of Ethel Lina White and Daphne du Maurier. There's no doubt that she ranks as a crime writer - she was an active figure in the CWA and elected to membership of the Detection Club in 1959.

The latter honour came two years after she published The Pretty Ones, which is very much in the Rebecca tradition. Emma, the protagonist, is one of those young women - appealing but not regarded as beautiful - who marries a handsome, rather mysterious man after a whirlwind romance and without getting to know him properly, let alone finding out much about his past. I find this pretty crazy behaviour, but I tried to overcome my prejudice when reading the story!

Emma's new husband is Barnaby, a successful writer of detective novels (though we learn next to nothing about his work, which I found disappointing - a missed opportunity, really). She discovers that he has been married before, to Josephine, but Josephine has not been seen by anyone for months, and Emma finds herself looking after the two 'difficult' young daughters that Josephine has abandoned.

This is a 'whowasdunin' story, with a body discovered on page one - we don't discover the corpse's identity until towards the end of the book. Does the corpse belong to Josephine or someone else? I found this a very readable story, although I have to say that I figured out what was going on, and who was responsible, after only about fifty pages. Not a masterpiece, then, but interesting enough for me to be tempted to read more of Eden's work.