Who's who?
Our niece's surname is a month, in German. Her twin was the second of four sisters, a writer who sold her hair, whose youngest sister burned her manuscript, and who turned down the boy next door. That twin's author also wrote lurid thrillers under a pen name, just as our Jo does.
"Bond" hides inside our doctor's surname, which is a perfectly real Afrikaans one. His twin is a naval officer who likes his martinis shaken rather than stirred and first appeared across a baccarat table. Check the doctor's number plate if you're still not sure.
Our cook's first name is a homely version of a grander French one, and her surname is what she once won. Her twin was a great Parisian chef who ended up cooking plain food for a pious household in a Norwegian village, won the lottery, and spent every franc of it on one magnificent dinner for them.
Our younger housekeeper grew up in a northern suburb of Cape Town whose name, said quickly, sounds very like her twin's family name. That twin was a dairymaid in Wessex who was badly wronged, and whose family name was grander than her life.
From the file
Stefaans took Dr Bondesio's coat when he arrived at ten past six. He hung it in the boot room to drip, he says, "as one does with a coat in that condition", and put newspaper under it. The Inspector has underlined the word drip.
Fourteen books hiding in a house
Here are twenty books. Fourteen of them are hiding in Laaste Hoofstuk, one for each of our literary guests. Six are here to lead you astray. Every one of them is worth reading.Â
Emma, Jane Austen
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Mafeking Road, Herman Charles Bosman
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Kringe in 'n bos, Dalene Matthee
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Jock of the Bushveld, Percy FitzPatrick
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Babette's Feast, Karen Blixen
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
PS: Louisa May Alcott, beloved for her gentle novel about four sisters, spent years writing sensational stories of revenge, murder, and opium under the name A. M. Barnard. The connection was decisively established in the 1940s, when rare-book dealer Madeleine Stern and librarian-bibliographer Leona Rostenberg found evidence in Alcott’s papers, including letters from her publisher. The heroine who wrote “blood and thunder” tales in the attic was more autobiographical than many readers had realized.