A Three Dog Problem

Hello!

Thank you for picking up A Three Dog Problem.

I hope you have had the opportunity to read The Windsor Knot – the first account of the Queen’s adventures as a detective in this series, though by no means her first outing as a secret sleuth, as later books will reveal. If you haven’t, don’t worry; I’d like to think you have a treat in store.

As I set out to write the series, my first thought was the wonderful array of settings for each book. Having described Her Majesty’s life at Windsor Castle, my next stop was Buckingham Palace, surely? And so A Three Dog Problem was born. The title comes from physics and from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As you may know, the ‘three-body problem’ is a feature of classical mechanics. I’m joking – I had no idea, did you? But anyway, it is. More to the point, whenever Sherlock Holmes has a very difficult case to solve, he has to smoke three pipes to do it and it becomes a ‘three pipe problem’. I loved this idea. And when the Queen has an exceptionally difficult case to consider, she needs to take three dogs for a walk in Buckingham Palace garden, hence ‘a three dog problem’. In this case they are two dorgis and a corgi, because I’m afraid to say the Queen was down to her last corgi in the autumn of 2016, when the book is set.

What happened that autumn? These books set their mysteries among the real-life meetings and musings of a busy monarch. Surely, after her 90^th birthday celebrations, I thought, she had a bit of quiet time? But no. It was the season of the fallout from the Brexit referendum, the US presidential elections, and the launch of a major programme to stop the Palace from falling apart. Would the Queen and Rozie have time to solve a couple of murders in her own London home? Reader, you will have to dip into these pages to find out if they did.

If you would like to know more about the real-life inspirations for this book, along with snippets from my research about the Royal Family, then do visit bit.ly/SJBennett where you can sign up to receive Royal Correspondence about the series. It only takes a few moments to sign up, there are no catches or costs.

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Thank you again for reading this book, and I hope you enjoy the other books to come.

With best wishes,

S. J. Bennett