By Gabrielle Pantera
“The next-door neighbour of my protagonist, Eleanor Trewynn, is an artist,” says author Carola Dunn. “Nick had a role in the first Cornish mystery, Manna from Hades. He’s a peaceable sort of chap, laid-back and easy-going. I just started wondering what would make him mad enough to resort to violence.”
Set in the sleepy Cornwall of the 1960s, A Colourful Death opens as murder disrupts the quiet life of Eleanor Trewynn, who is widowed and works at the charity shop below her home in the village of Port Mabyn. On returning from a train trip to London, Eleanor’s friend and neighbor Nick Gresham discovers that someone has slashed several of his paintings in his shop.
Not wanting to go to the police, Nick sets out to confront rival artist Geoffrey Monmouth, who Nick is sure is the culprit. Accompanied by an anxious Eleanor, Nick finds Geoff stabbed to death in his Padstow bungalow. The police detain Nick, while Eleanor sets out to track down the real killer.
“Apart from going to Cornwall (where my sister fortunately lives) and researching the specific places I used as settings for A Colourful Death, the most interesting research was into the dyes used by commercial artists,’ says Dunn. “A friend of mine who’s an artist bought three samples of red dye and we tried them all out on an old rag to see if any would give the effect I wanted. Luckily one did – and I still have the rag lying around in my office to prove it.”
I’m doing my first virtual blog tour,” says Dunn. “It’s fun coming up with posts that are a little different from each other, different angles, all connected with the new book.”
Some of the blogs Carola has contributed to are: makeminemystery.blogspot.com; meanderingsandmuses.blogspot.com/
and wordwenches.typepad.com/wordwenches/
“I was invited to be a guest speaker on a mystery authors’ panel in aid of the Friends of Anaheim Library,” says Dunn “We panelists were asked to let them auction off the name of a character in our next book. A long-time reader of my mysteries bid $800 to have me include her sister’s name in A Colourful Death. She gave me a lot of information about her sister, and I had fun working some of it into my story. I hope she likes the result!”
A Colourful Death has not yet being adapted for film or television. Dunn is currently working on her twentieth Daisy Dalrymple mystery, Gone West. The nineteenth, Anthem for Doomed Youth, will be out in Feb/March 2011.
“I’m very happy to be able to announce that all of the Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries are being published in the UK and Commonwealth at last, by Constable & Robinson, a firm founded in 1795,” says Dunn. “Some of those UK editions already out have been spotted in the window of Hatchard’s bookstore, a firm founded in 1797.”
This is the second Aunt Nell Cornish amateur sleuth mystery. The dialog is great and Dunn’s descriptions of Cornwall are very vivid. Even though the characters where a bit one-dimensional Dunn’s dialog is right on the mark for 1960.
Rating: *** 3 stars
A Colourful Death: A Cornish Mystery by Carola Dunn. Hardcover, 352 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books, 1 edition (June 8, 2010), Language: English, ISBN, 9780312379469 $24.99
