Plaster Sinners
Sergeant Love is a sucker for a picturesque country cottage.
But he finds himself quite literally knocked out by the little bas-relief plaster cottage that’s on display at Flaxborough’s antiques auction. This pretty but rather crudely painted trinket mysteriously sells for hundreds of pounds having sparked a heated bidding war, while the Sergeant gets floored by a would-be cottage thief.
So DI Purbright, teamed up with a world-weary brother officer down from London, must dig deep into the dubious past of the local gentry, the laconic Moldhams, in their crumbling stately pile, to find out how the little plaster picture leads to a tale of heirlooms and murder.
Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson’s tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay.
Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon, England. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a local newspaper in a Lincolnshire market town. His years as a journalist there proved a formative experience, and he collected then much of the material that formed the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. He died in 1983.