Moonflower Murders

But Madeline Cain is also a murderer and she kills Francis Pendleton – FP – the fictional equivalent of Frank Parris.

Madeline Cain is an anagram of Aiden MacNeil.

As I got back into my car, I reflected on what I had learned. I kept going over and over one thought in my mind. Just about every student who had been at Bromeswell Grove had disliked George Saunders. They’d all wanted him to drop dead. Just the sight of him had been enough to reduce Derek Endicott to a jabbering wreck.

But it had been Frank Parris who had died

Obviously, that’s Raymond Chandler, who created Philip Marlowe, perhaps the most iconic of private detectives. Algernon Marsh comes from Ngaio Marsh, Madeline Cain from James M. Cain, who wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice and the wonderful Double Indemnity, Nancy Mitchell from Gladys Mitchell, who wrote over sixty crime novels – Philip Larkin was a fan.

Algernon knows about will.

Blackmails him?

Jason had one-night stand with Nancy.

£60

Knickers stolen from drawer

would join a gang at Jamaica Inn, preying on the wretched sailors who came too close. I would fall madly in love with Edward Rochester, but in my version of the story I would save him from the flames. I would travel to the lost city of Kôr and find immortality in the Pillar of Fire.

But the worst of it was the sense of helplessness – that events had taken over and I was being steered by them rather than the other way round.

‘Criminals rarely fascinate me, my friend.’
‘Is that so?’
Pünd thought for a minute. ‘They think, always, that they are cleverer than they really are, that they have the ability to defeat the police, the rule of law, the very essence of society in order to achieve their ends.’
‘It makes them dangerous.’
‘It makes them predictable. What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.’

’m being too negative. Of course it was wonderful too. The Aegean sunset is like nothing you will see anywhere in the world and I would watch it every evening, staring in wonder. No wonder the Greeks believed in gods – Helios in his golden chariot blazing across that enormous sky, the Lasithiotika mountains transformed into strips of the thinnest gauze, first pink, then mauve, darkening and fading at the same time. I swam at seven o’clock every morning, washing away in the crystal sea the traces of too much wine and cigarette smoke. There were dinners in tiny tavernas in Fourni and Limnes with the smell of jasmine, the stars twinkling, raucous laughter, the clink of raki glasses. I’d even started to learn Greek, working three hours a week with a girl young enough to be my daughter who managed to take the stressed syllables and verbs that weren’t just irregular but downright indecent and somehow make them fun

Everything in life has a pattern and a coincidence is simply the moment when that pattern becomes briefly visible

He just needs a bit of TLC