Hollow Crown

Having dealt with death in Sweet Poison and The Bones of the Buried, Lord Edward Corinth is invited by his friend Joe Weaver, the press lord and close friend of the British royal family, for the comparatively simpler case of recovering certain letters stolen from the king's intimate friend Wallis Simpson. There is no mystery about who has taken these letters—it is a woman called Mrs. Raymond Harkness, a former mistress of the king and a close friend of Edward's. When Edward goes down to Haling, the country house of conservative M.P. Leo Scannon where Mrs. Harkness is also a house guest, he cannot guess that retrieving stolen goods is to be complicated by a murder. Edward's friend and fellow sleuth, the journalist Verity Browne, returned from the savagery of the Spanish Civil War, welcomes the distraction of helping Edward investigate what suddenly becomes a double murder. Both Edward and Verity are soon involved with political protest and the fight against Fascism—the Cable Street riots and the Jarrow March—and both battle to find the truth behind the hollow crown in what the poet W. H. Auden called "a low, dishonest decade."