The Word Is Murder

Acknowledgements

A great many people helped me with this book.

I am very grateful to Edward Kemp, the Director of RADA, for inviting me into the academy to watch him rehearse. Lucy Skilbeck, the Director of Actor Training, provided me with further background material and also introduced me to Zoe Waites, who gave me a brilliant account of her time there – she was roughly contemporary with Damian Cowper. Charlie Archer, a recent graduate, also described his auditions and gave me further insights and the theatre director Lindsay Posner provided me with notes from his still-celebrated production of Hamlet.

In order to understand Robert Cornwallis, I spent time with Andrew Leverton, whose own funeral service is nothing like the one described in these pages. Colin Sutton is a former detective who, like Hawthorne, has worked with many television companies. I have to say that he was far more helpful with background detail than Hawthorne himself. My brother, Philip Horowitz, gave me a legal briefing on Diana Cowper’s traffic accident and the case that followed.

I have a brilliant new editor in Selina Walker at Penguin Random House and both Hawthorne and I were delighted that she accepted the book. We are also grateful to our very diligent copy-editor, Caroline Pretty, and to Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown who gave us invaluable advice when Hilda Starke was unavailable.

As always I must thank my wife, Jill Green, and my two sons, Nick and Cass, who not only read the book and helped me with it in its early stages but didn’t object too much when they found themselves drawn into it.