It can be a bit of an embarrassment when your old man is done in. Particularly, when you are a rising inspector with CID, and hated his guts. Particularly, when your old man was at the time subjecting himself to a do-it-yourself version of a Spanish Inquisition torture. And wearing spangled tights. What it meant was that Perry Trethowan had to go back to the home of his ancestors and do a bit of semi-official sleuthing. Like the Sitwells and the Mitfords, the Trethowans proved that Birth and Artistic Talent could go together. The Trethowans, though, made one hope it didn't happen too often. Perry's father had been a dilettante composer so minor that he stopped composing long before he started decomposing. His Uncle Lawrence, head of the family, was a poet of sorts, one of his aunts a stage designer, another an overgrown schoolgirl who had never grown out of her Thirties crush on Adolf Hitler. And that's only the older generation. Perry goes with fear and trembling back into the lions' den, and finds that his worst forebodings are mere shadows of the grisly reality.
- ISBN10 0002318717
- ISBN13 9780002318716
- Publish Date 28 September 1981
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint HarperCollins Distribution Services
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 192
- Language English