With Detective novels from the 1920s or 30s, I'm always conscious of the distance between when it was written and when I'm reading it. Not that I think you need to be

immersed in the historical context to enjoy a murder mystery. That's not it at all.

Part of what makes these stories and characters so enduringly popular is how

mobile they are. For the best of them, the process of working out who-done it is as

fun in 2020 as it was in 1930. But reading them now is inevitably a

different experience. The world has changed and I'm not part of that reading

public that Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers imagined that they were addressing

when they put pen to paper all those decades ago. But what if we could hear from someone who grew up

through the 20th century alongside these books,

reading them as they came out. That would be really something, wouldn't it?

And that's why today we're going to hear from Renee.

Welcome to She Dunnet.

Welcome to She Dunnet.

I'm Caroline Crampton. I don't know if you know anything about me but I went out to work when I was 12 and where I was

working I was closer to a large library, a city library.

This is Renee.

She was born in the town of Napier on the North Island of New Zealand in 1929.

Her life was touched by death early on. When she was four years old René's father shot himself, seemingly completely out of the blue.

In her memoir, These Two Hands, she quotes from a contemporary newspaper account of his death,

which makes this inexplicable family tragedy sound rather like something from a 1930s murder

mystery. It says, Stanley George Howard Jones left his home,

ostensibly to go to Napier, purchased a 22-caliber rifle there,

...