Sweet Poison

‘Augustus knows he is inconveniencing a great many people, and he is enjoying this. He will not change his mind.’

Augustus Gale was a man in love—with a woman of genius who had been dead for over a century. So great was his dedication to the memory of playwright Joan Farmer that Augustus bought her ancestral home, steeped himself in the local history, and attempted to enforce a Regency-style lifestyle on his entire household. This macabre devotion poisoned his life as well as the lives of his son and daughter, his beautiful second wife, and even his devoted mother. Yet it was a strictly confined historical obsession.  When a party of archaeologists sought permission to excavate a rare Roman mosaic pavement on Augustus’s land, disrupting his homage to Joan, they were met with a blunt, contemptuous and destructive refusal. It might be said that Augustus Gale was a man who “asked for it”, but whose was the hand that fed him the poison?

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman (1897–1959), a classical scholar who taught Greek at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff. Beginning in 1937, Freeman wrote twenty-nine mysteries and a number of short stories as Mary Fitt, and was elected to the Detection Club in 1950. Aside from her detective novels, Freeman published many books on classical Greece, scholarly articles and children’s stories. She lived in St Mellons in Wales with her partner Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet, a family physician and author.