Stretched across the road was the body of a policeman.
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
Load of Hay
, an ancient Dickensian pub full of unsavoury characters, and Terhune finds the clues may lay in the history of 18
th
century smuggling in the Romney Marsh.
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-
Seven Clues in Search of a Crime
(1941);
House with Crooked Walls
(1942);
A Case for Solomon
(1943);
Work for the Hangman
(1944);
Ten Trails to Tyburn
A Case of Books
(1946) and
And a Bottle of Rum
(1949)-are republished by Moonstone Press.