The Crooked Inn
By Ernest Dudley
Max Mitchell and Dan Evans, two London playwrights, are seeking inspiration for their next play.
But when they travel to Wales, events quickly take a turn towards stranger than fiction.
On a dark and stormy night, they reach the restless village of Llanberis, where rumours of a murderer on the loose are keeping the locals up. Their driver is so distracted he’s even taken them to the wrong hotel, The Crooked Inn. The storm keeps them stuck inside, despite the efforts of a less-than-welcoming concierge.
This concierge begins to seem a little more than unwelcoming; in fact he’s acting highly suspiciously. Luckily the niece of the hotelier is on hand to sort out a room for them. She’s just one of a cast of characters adding to the local colour and currently occupying The Crooked Inn.
Add to the suspicious behaviour of the staff and guests the arrival of a Policeman on the hunt for the jailbreak murderer, it becomes pretty clear to Max and Dan that they’ve stumbled upon fertile material for their new play.
The problem is whether they’ll find time to write it when there’s a real-life murder case to solve… and a real-life murderer to run from.
The Crooked Inn is a theatrical murder mystery in which the characters leap off the page.
Ernest Dudley ran away from home at seventeen to become an actor in a Shakespearean troop, where he would later meet his future wife on the set of Peter Pan. Dudley then turned his attention to writing, first as a journalist, then as a writer for radio, television and film, before embarking on historical and detective novel writing. He was a founding member of the Crime Writers Association, and a marathon runner well into old age.