Electrical recording equipment was very new in 1925 and was pioneered by Western Electric. It’s a stretch for Malcolm Bilverton to have ‘all the latest gear from America’, but it’s just about possible. Enthusiasts find a way.

  The first English stately home to open its doors to the public was Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire in 1946, so Veronica’s tour of Bilverton House and its grounds wouldn’t have been a familiar idea. The role of tour guide, though, was well established, and the guides who accompanied young men on the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were known as ‘bear-leaders’ (from the old Oxford University slang that referred to students as bears, and the similarly obsolete term for one who trains actual bears).

  Veronica mentions giving the house to the National Trust. The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty was founded in 1895 as a heritage conservation charity. It first purchased (or was gifted) land, and smaller threatened buildings. In 1907 it acquired its first large country house, Barrington Court in Somerset (which proved much more expensive to renovate and maintain than they had anticipated). In 1936 the Trust set up The Country House Scheme, and a couple of Acts of Parliament later was able to take ownership of country houses where the owners could no longer afford to maintain them. It enabled the owners to escape estate duty on the house but allowed them to keep living there as long as they allowed some public access. If the Bilvertons did get into financial difficulties, they only needed to try to hang on for another eleven years and they could stay in the house in exchange for allowing a few visitors. Veronica’s tour guide experience might come in handy.

  A brief note for American (and some Canadian) readers. In Britain (and, indeed, most places outside the USA), the word ‘cider’ refers exclusively to the alcoholic drink made from fermented apple juice, known to Americans as ‘hard cider’. We do use the term ‘sweet cider’, but even that isn’t the same as in the USA and is simply alcoholic cider that happens to be sweet rather than the unfiltered apple juice you might be expecting.

  Although the book was written during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, the fact that the characters are stuck in Bilverton House is completely coincidental. The story was planned in 2019 and it was always my intention to trap them in the house somehow, but it wasn’t until a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2019 that the idea of the flood occurred to me. We were staying at a country house hotel not far from the town and were prevented from visiting Anne Hathaway’s cottage because the road outside it was flooded. It seemed like the perfect way to prevent my characters from leaving Bilverton House and of stopping anyone else from getting to them, even though flooding in late June is much less commonplace in England.

  The right to silence has been part of English common law since the seventeenth century. The police caution (‘You do not have to say anything,’ etc.) is a little harder to pin down. It has taken many forms over the years and I haven’t been able to establish whether it was given in the 1920s, nor precisely what form it took. I have taken the liberty of including it anyway.

  Acknowledgments

  There’s always a danger when writing acknowledgements that someone will be overlooked. A lot of people help make a book and I try to be sure to thank them personally, but perhaps setting it down in print would be good, too. So huge thanks go to Jack Butler, Nicole Wagner and everyone else at Thomas & Mercer who have looked after me – and the books – so well.

  And . . .

  I have been working with Jane Snelgrove since she acquired the first Lady Hardcastle books in 2015. She has guided and encouraged me, and has played a major part in the success of the Lady Hardcastle books and now this new series, The Dizzy Heights. Her editorial advice has been perceptive, clearly thought through and always, always right. Her friendship has been unstinting and uplifting. Without her, the books and I would have been merely OK. With her we have, to use one of her own favourite words, ‘sparkled’.

  Thank you, Jane.

  About the Author

  Photo © 2018 Clifton Photographic Company

  T E Kinsey grew up in London and read history at Bristol University. He worked for a number of years as a magazine features writer before falling into the glamorous world of the Internet, where he edited content for a very famous entertainment website for quite a few years more. After helping to raise three children, learning to scuba dive and to play the drums and mandolin (though never, disappointingly, all at the same time), he decided the time was right to get back to writing. A Baffling Murder at the Midsummer Ball is the second story in the Dizzy Heights series. His website is at www.tekinsey.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @tekinsey as well as on Facebook: www.facebook.com/tekinsey.

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