Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (26 page)

Every book I write is really for my parents. For my father, for teaching me to love language and putting every book that matters to me into my hands when I was a child, and for my mother, for faithfully reading every word that I wrote as a result (even the bad ones).
Murder Most Unladylike
would not exist without them.

I began to write this book in 2011, for NaNoWriMo. Most of the first draft happened in the break room of the Oxford branch of Blackwell’s Bookstore – so thank you, so much, to each one of my amazing and talented colleagues there, and especially to Rebecca Waiting, children’s bookseller extraordinaire.

Thank you also to my early readers, most especially Rebecca Stevens, Boadicea Meath Baker (who also supplied me with extensive period detail and a historically accurate writing soundtrack), Fleur Frederick, and Moniza Hossein (who courageously read all 85,000 words of the first draft while sick with flu). I salute them all, and I hope it’s better now.

Many thanks to my large and lovely family, every last one of you, and to my friends, who bear with me wonderfully and who all played a part in
Murder Most Unladylike
(even though they probably don’t know it). Alice, Alison, Amy, Ana, Damien, Emily, Emma (all of you), Jeff, Julia, Laurence, Max, Owain, Priya, Richard, Sarah (ALL of you), Scarlett, Zara and everyone else. Thank you especially to Matthew, for being surprisingly willing to live with me and love me even though my head is full of books, and to the whole Smalley family, for making me feel so welcome.

I have been very lucky in my publishers. Thank you to the fantastic Natalie Doherty, Annie Eaton and the whole team at Random House, who have made my publishing process feel like a dream. My books could not have found a better or more enthusiastic home. Thanks also to the delightful Kristin Ostby and the team at S&S US, for welcoming Hazel and Daisy to America in such style. And of course, to my other publishing family at Orion, especially Amber Caravéo and Fiona Kennedy, huge thanks – they have taught me so well, and they have been so willing to harbour an author in their editorial ranks.

This book, and I, though, would still be lost if it were not for one marvellous woman: my agent, Gemma Cooper. She fell for Hazel and Daisy and she changed my life. There aren’t words to express my gratitude. There never will be. Thank you.

Robin Stevens, Cambridge and London, 2013

About the Author

Robin Stevens was born in California and grew up in an Oxford college, across the road from the house where Alice in Wonderland lived. She has been making up stories all her life.

When she was twelve, her father handed her a copy of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
and she realised that she wanted to be either Hercule Poirot or Agatha Christie when she grew up. When it occurred to her that she was never going to be able to grow her own spectacular walrus moustache, she decided that Agatha Christie was the more achieveable option.

She spent her teenage years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, reading a lot of murder mysteries and hoping that she’d get the chance to do some detecting herself (she didn’t). She then went to university, where she studied crime fiction, and now she works at a children’s publisher, which is pretty much the best day job she can imagine.

Robin now lives in Cambridge with her boyfriend and her pet bearded dragon, Watson.

MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE: A WELLS & WONG MYSTERY
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 19315 8

Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company

This ebook edition published 2014

Copyright © Robin Stevens, 2014
Map and illustrations copyright © Nina Tara, 2014

First Published in Great Britain

Corgi Childrens 9780552570725 2014

The right of Robin Stevens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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