Mark Aldridge

I am sick of opening letters about it.

And does the people I really minded knowing about it were my friends?

It's really all washed up.

Now, in America, the important thing is, is that in these pre-internet times, it had never been a secret that Mary Westmacott was a pseudonym of someone.

So it's actually always been made clear that that wasn't a real person.

Way back in 1930, the Chattanooga News said that only three people know the real name of Mary Westmacott, author of Giant's Bread, novel recently published.

Those three are the author herself, her agent and her publishers.

Miss Westmacott, an English woman, is well known on both sides of the Atlantic for her novels of another type.

And because Giant's Bread is so different from those others, she wants it judged on its own merits and not in the light of her previous successes.

Hence the pseudonym.

So you're already, you're almost daring people to find out who Mary West McCoy is for quite a long time.

Now, the other bit of this puzzle is that we talk about 1949, post Rose and the Yew Tree.

In actual fact, in 1944, so the same year that Absinthe in the Spring was published.

That's true.

Um, several reviews of the book mentioned that Wes McColl was alleged to be Agatha Christie.

So this is reviews of absent in this break.

In America.

So, uh, have a guess, uh, in the Buffalo courier express was the name of the article.

It says September, 1944, uh,

A neat theatrical novel which has just appeared is absent in the spring, which is signed Mary Westmacott.