When Katharine Armstrong died, quietly in her bed, on a Tuesday morning in February 1921, the circumstances surrounding her death were so ordinary that the very idea that a book might be written about it a century later would have seemed absurd.
Yet over the years her demise would come to inspire a good deal more than just this meticulously researched new investigation by Stephen Bates. What happened after the 48-year-old passed away in sleepy Hay-on-Wye fueled the creative minds of some of the greatest detective novelists of the 20th century — Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Georgette Heyer — as they forged the Golden Age of crime writing. Centering on her husband, Major Herbert Armstrong, who, the year after Katharine died, was sensationally found guilty of her murder and hanged, the tale delivers many of the themes we still associate with classic detective fiction.
