And A Bottle of Rum

<p><em>Stretched across the road was the body of a policeman.</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(33 29 30 1)>On the way home one evening in the Romney Marsh Bookseller Theodore Terhune and friend Julia are caught in heavy coastal fog. A passing lorry provides some guidance on the narrow country roads but the night ends with intentional mishap and a dead body. It becomes clear that the constable's death was not accidental but what possessed Tom Kitchen to try to stop a lorry singlehandedly at 1am? His widow is frightened; local farms vandalized; his home ransacked. Suspicion centres around the </span><em style=color: rgba(33 29 30 1)>Load of Hay</em><span style=color: rgba(33 29 30 1)> an ancient Dickensian pub full of unsavoury characters and Terhune finds the clues may lay in the history of 18</span><sup style=color: rgba(33 29 30 1)>th</sup><span style=color: rgba(33 29 30 1)> century smuggling in the Romney Marsh.</span></p><p><br></p><p>BRUCE GRAEME (1900-82) was a pseudonym of Graham Montague Jeffries an author of more than 100 crime novels and a founding member of the Crime Writers' Association. He created six series sleuths including bookseller and accidental detective Theodore Terhune whose adventures-<em>Seven Clues in Search of a Crime</em> (1941); <em>House with Crooked Walls</em> (1942); <em>A Case for Solomon</em> (1943); <em>Work for the Hangman</em> (1944); <em>Ten Trails to Tyburn</em> (1944); <em>A Case of Books</em> (1946) and <em>And a Bottle of Rum</em> (1949)-are republished by Moonstone Press.</p>