HOW A POISON PEN CAMPAIGN AT BLENHEIM PALACE TRIGGERED A COSY CRIME SERIES

HOW A POISON PEN CAMPAIGN AT BLENHEIM PALACE TRIGGERED A COSY CRIME SERIES

What would you do if you worked at “Britain’s greatest palace”, full of underground cellars, hidden rooms, and secret staircases, and then received your very own poison pen letter threatening your future? You’d write a book about it, of course. And that’s exactly what I did, reimagining Blenheim Palace as a creaky, rundown stately home on the Welsh border, and calling it Duntisbourne Hall.

When I went to work at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire twenty years ago, little had changed since it first opened its door in the 1950s. It’s a very different operation today, but back then it was hand-written diaries, bull-dog clips, time sheets and ancient guides shuffling frozen visitors around the staterooms. 

It was closed to the public from October to February, and in the winter of 2004, I stayed on to help the education officer. The self-styled ‘archivist’ was a charming old boy, and armed with his bunch of keys, I ran errands for him in the empty palace. In the cold and dark, I found everything I needed for a cosy mystery series – spiral staircases, underground cellars, rooms full of broken armour, royal seals and secret caches of ancient books. But when I took a couple of days off work with a heavy cold, something even more intriguing arrived at my cottage – a poison pen letter, written on Blenheim Palace stationery, franked on the Blenheim Palace office machine, and typed on a typewriter: 

“Dear Mrs Ferguson (name misspelled) 

We understand your health is not good and will get worse. 

The education department will face many taxing challenges soon. 

This may be a splendid opportunity for you to leave.

A well wisher”

A mystery was on. 

I immediately told my boss. I was keen to make the contents of the letter known to everyone who worked with me, letting the anonymous writer hear their collective condemnation, but my boss wasn’t keen. It transpired that over the past couple of years he’d received several disturbed and vicious letters, including an adult video sent to his home address, apparently ordered by him and his then assistant, an attractive woman in her sixties. 

The CEO of Blenheim Palace at the time had also had a letter, setting out the reasons for putting the education officer out to pasture, accusing him of favouritism, timewasting, incompetence, and arrogance. His wife received one, telling her that he was having another affair, this time with me (I was “fast and loose”, apparently), and that he’d had affairs with all his other assistants, one of whom had had “sex with a million men” and asking if he was “an expert with all the Kama Sutra poses” or had “tried them on you”? The letters became increasingly deranged as the season progressed. “What a prick you are!” “We hate you.” “Someone will pay the price.” “Her days are numbered.” “Watch this space.”

He was convinced that a woman was writing them, and that she was one of the guides who had assisted him in the winter of 2001. Despite being in his seventies, white-haired and rather overweight with a gammy knee and a walking stick, he was certain she had been “trailing the bait”. In his view, these were the letters of a woman scorned. 

Now here I must disappoint you because, despite an investigation by the Woodstock constabulary, the culprit was never unmasked. Many agreed with my boss’s hunch, but I didn’t. I had another theory, one I couldn’t prove, so instead I wrote a book about it, a fiction that unmasked the real culprit. I called it The Archivist in deference to my old boss. 

Despite setting the story in Duntisbourne Hall and embellishing the characters inspired by real people, the book caused a bit of a stir at Blenheim. Some of the staff were offended because they thought they recognised themselves, and the rest were annoyed because they didn’t. On the eve of the publication of the second book in the trilogy, The Golden Hand, I and my very own Max Black felt it was time to leave the palace.

During my long sojourn into the more serious world of mainstream publishing and historical fiction, most of the people who inspired the characters in the books have moved on to the great stately home in the sky. It was time to complete the Duntisbourne trilogy with The Hipkiss File and to finally reveal that The Archivist of Duntisbourne Hall was my solution to a real-life mystery that could never be solved. 

The Archivist, The Golden Hand and The Hipkiss File are all available on Amazon.

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Loraine Fergusson is a writer based in Oxfordshire. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for competitions including the Orwell Society and Oxfordshire Libraries. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University and won the Blackwell’s Prize in 2015. As LP Fergusson she writes historical fiction – A Dangerous Act of Kindness (2019) is set in a rural community in 1940, and The Summer Fields focuses on the Battle of Blenheim. In 2020 she was a Historical Writers Association Gold Crown judge. She is also the editor of the blog With Love from Graz, which was featured on BBC Radio Wales, Radio 2 and the BBC4 programme A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley.

Website: https://lpfergusson.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LPFergusson

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lpfergusson/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LPFergusson

 

THE HIPKISS FILE

The Major smoothed his whiskers, dropped his head and said darkly, ‘But you know where the bodies are buried.’

Having completed his custodial sentence, the former archivist to the Earl of Duntisbourne is hell-bent on revenge, but when an ancient visitor to the Hall recognises his contemporary, Claude Hipkiss, as a retired MI6 agent living under an assumed name, BS’s most important asset goes missing along with the dossier that holds the key to the Earl’s demise.

As Sam vacillates about her feelings for Max, outside events draw them both into a harrowing world of subterfuge and danger as the Duntisbourne trilogy accelerates towards a thrilling conclusion.

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Category: On Writing