Death of a Delft Blue

DEATH OF A DELFT BLUE

Death of a Delft Blue revolves around three interrelated families, the Colwyn-Welch family who are English-Dutch, the van Zestiens, who are Dutch-Danish and the family called Rose. Binnen Colwyn-Welch obtains her quite considerable income from her Dutch father’s bulb-fields. She lives in Amsterdam with her two unmarried daughters, and it is to Amsterdam that Florian Colwyn-Welch goes to sit to a sculptor and to have a painting made of his right hand holding a Delft Blue hyacinth. From this sitting he does not return.

The motive for his murder is unusual, but for the murderer it is overriding and would have been perfectly comprehensible to James Elroy Flecker. It was also comprehensible to Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley: and though her secretary, Laura Gavin, reached the same solution, she did so not by logic, but by chance and a tune played on a barrel-organ.