Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder.

Wish you were here.

Follow the price of Paradise Now,

wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello She-Dannit listeners and welcome to something a little different.

This is a crossover episode with another podcast that I'm making at the moment in

connection with my new book a body made of glass a history of hypochondria. In that

series I'm hosting conversations that encompass the intersection of health

anxiety with different aspects of medicine, scientific history, mental health and more.

And I thought that this one, with past Shidonic guest Moira Redmond, might be of interest to you.

We're talking today not about detective fiction, but about another

major popular fiction trend of the interwar period, school stories. To be more specific,

the shallow school series written by Eleanor Embred Dyer.

The first book, The School at the Chalet, was published in 1925, and 57 more books then

followed until the last one, Prefects of the Shala School appeared in 1970.

The school is originally based in Austria, but moves in the late 1930s in reaction to the rise of the Nazi party and then relocates variously to the Channel Islands, the UK and then Switzerland.

It is no exaggeration to say that I was as a child and still am to a large extent obsessed with these books.

And as you'll hear Moira and I discuss, the vision of health that they promote was very influential

to me in forming my own early views on that subject and then later they had a role to play in shaping my hyperchondria and health anxiety.

...