Murder at the Fair is the 6th book in the Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery Series. If you don’t know the books they are set in 1920s England. Lady Swift is a rather independent woman who has spent most of her upbringing abroad among rather Bohemian types. At the age of twenty-nine, she returns to England on unexpectedly inheriting her eccentric uncle’s country estate.

Along with the estate she also inherits her late uncle’s staff, including Clifford, the propriety-mad butler, who tries to teach her how to be a proper lady of the Manor, and Master Gladstone, her late uncle’s elderly and wilful bulldog, who tries to teaches her how to steal sausages and snore the afternoons away.

The inspiration for this 6th book, Murder at the Fair, came from a minor character in the 4th book in the series, Solemn Jon, the local undertaker in the village of Little Buckford. I liked the character – and name – so much that he forced himself into Murder at the Fair. At first, he was going to bury the victim as he did in book 4, but then I thought what if he were the victim? After all, as Eleanor says to Clifford ‘‘When the man who buries the dead dies, Clifford, who is left to bury him?’

So I decided to murder the local undertaker. The question was: where and when?

Readers of the Lady Swift series are based all over the world, but the majority are almost evenly split between the UK and the US. So for my US readers, I always try to include a setting that is quintessentially British and of the time. For this book, I chose a typical 1920s English May Fair, including maypoles, Morris dancers and the May Queen leading a procession down to the river with Jack Green dancing around the villagers.

I then took a terrible liberty, however, by introducing a raft race, during the course of which, Solemn Jon is murdered.

Raft races weren’t really part of rural English fairs until much later, but races, on and off – land and water-based – between rival villagers, and villages, have been going on since time immemorial. And besides, Lady Swift’s late uncle instigated the race and he was ahead of his time and, as I said, quite eccentric.

The inspiration for the raft race itself comes from the time I used to live on the river and my local village used to have the most splendid race involving mostly capsizing crafts, explosive-filled boats and people water skiing behind Landrovers. It usually ended with the local police abandoning their own raft (one year a giant policeman’s helmet) and half-heartedly trying to restore some semblance of order. 

Things were more ‘relaxed’ and informal back then. ‘Sigh’.

Anyway, the raft race in Murder at the Fair was suitably toned down from its source of inspiration, although Solemn Jon does build a raft incorporating gravestones. I actually wanted him to take part in the race with a raft in the shape of a coffin, but my editor told me my character building his own coffin that he was then murdered in was a little too ‘dark’ for my readers.

Still, it would have been a nice touch.

The setting for the second murder – spoiler alert – comes from my present, not past. I live near Benjamin Disraeli’s old country estate and Rankin Manor, the scene of the second murder, is loosely based on it. That’s another thing you really have to do – litter the pages with stately homes if you’re writing in the 1920s, even though, in reality, more were being pulled down than built.

And finally, the inspiration for the murderer came again from my past.

But if I were to tell you any more, you’d know who it was.

And where would be the fun in that?


Verity Bright is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing partnership that has spanned a quarter of a century. Starting out writing high-end travel articles and books, they published everything from self-improvement to humour, before embarking on their first historical mystery. They are the authors of the fabulous Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery series, set in the 1920s.