The House that Jack Built

Eileen Dewhurst

Pan Macmillan, Feb 14, 2013 - Fiction - 224 pages

Sue Halliday has spent the first sixteen years of her life appearing in Festival TV’s long-running programme The House that Jack Built. Infatuated with her co-star Ralph Boyd, she documents her feelings in a private diary, never thinking that it could be stolen.

Sinister telephone calls threatening to make the diary public make Sue feel that she is unable to trust anyone around her, and any one of her fellow actors could be the voice making her pay for her feelings. Then accidents to characters in the serial parallel accidents to the actors in real life and Sue is implicated in an increasingly murderous chain of events

About the author

An only child, Eileen Dewhurst was self-sufficient and bookish from an early age, preferring solitude or one-to-one contacts to groups, and hating sport. Her first attempts at writing were not auspicious. At 14, a would-be family saga was aborted by an uncle discovering it and quoting from it choked with laughter. A second setback came a few years later at school, when a purple passage was returned with the words 'Cut this cackle!' written across it in red ink: a chastening lesson in how embellishments can weaken rather than strengthen one’s message. Eileen read English at Oxford, and afterwards spent some unmemorable years in 'Admin' before breaking free and dividing her life in two: winters in London doing temporary jobs to earn money and experience, summers at home as a freelance journalist,spinning 'think pieces' for the Liverpool Daily Post and any other publications that would take them, and reporting on food and fashion for the long defunct Illustrated Liverpool News, as well as writing a few plays. Her first sustained piece of writing was a fantasy for children which was never published but secured an agent. Her Great Autobiographical Novel was never published either, although damned with faint praise and leading to an attempt at crime writing that worked: over the next thirty years she produced almost a book a year and also published some short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Eileen has always written from an ironic stance, never allowing her favourite characters to take themselves too seriously: a banana skin is ever lurking.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The House that Jack Built
• Author: Eileen Dewhurst
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2013
• ISBN: 1447240790, 9781447240792
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General