Shearing, Joseph – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:38:00 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Shearing, Joseph – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 Airing in a Close Carriage https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/airing-in-a-close-carriage/ Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=54173 A different kind of crime novel for the Crime Classics series, presenting a fictionalised version of a real-life murder case and unravelling the mysteries of the people at its core. The author, who also wrote as Marjorie Bowen, is experiencing a resurgence in interest, partly due to the Tales of the Weird editions of The Haunted Vintage and Julia Roseingrave. Brings another unjustly neglected author into the limelight, helping to populate the landscape of popular crime fiction in Britain during the Second World War.

]]> “She said once she heard some people told to get an airing in a closed carriage and that her life had been like that, trying to get fresh air, but always closed up, in a box.”

As warm sunshine bathes the streets of Paris in the late 1800s, the lively young debutante May meets the cotton-broker John Tyler. Far from a picturesque romance, life with the boorish broker turns sour as they move to Manchester and May finds herself trapped in a world of hostile servants and neglect. When Tyler meets his end from an overdose of arsenic – the drug which he was so fond of prescribing himself as a kind of panacea – May is dragged into a trial coloured by the public’s hunger to paint her as a beguiling murderess.

Based on the real-life murder trial of Florence Maybrick in 1899, this novel spins the gripping tale of a case clouded by sensation, its unsolved mysteries, and the untold story of the human being at its heart. First published in 1943, it was filmed as The Mark of Cain in 1947.

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