New book echoes Littlehampton's poison pen scandal

Dark Days at the Beach Hotel (Hera Books, an imprint of Canelo, paperback £9.99, Kindle £1.99) comes from Francesca Capaldi, aged 66, who was brought up in Littlehampton and now lives in New Ash Green in Kent.

She explains: “Dark Days at the Beach Hotel is the third in the series, all of which are fictional stories set in what was a real hotel in Littlehampton. For this particular book, I knew I wanted it to be manageress Helen Bygrove’s story. I do a lot of research for all my books, and as I was planning this story, I was reading Christopher Hilliard’s book The Littlehampton Libels, a true story of libellous letters sent in Littlehampton in the early 1920s.

“I was reading it for the period and area detail as it took place only two streets away from the Beach Hotel and only four or five years later, However, it occurred to me that poison pen letters, sent by one person but blamed on someone else, would add a satisfying thread to the book, causing trouble and misdirection for several of the characters. It was also good research for police procedure at the time and the trial that followed. The characters in my book who send and receive the letters or who are accused of writing them never existed, but the fact that the real perpetrators lived so close and would have known the hotel added some authenticity to the idea.

“Helen had been a secondary character in the previous books, and I knew from reader feedback that they were keen to hear more of her story with her controlling husband Douglas. What with the poison pen letters, Douglas’s increasing interference and skullduggery, the involvement of the good-looking but taciturn Detective Inspector Toshack and with the ongoing support of Helen’s loyal and resourceful staff, I think readers will like the twists and turns of this story.

“I discovered that a film based on The Littlehampton Libels, called Wicked Little Letters, was due out about a week after my book. Such a strange coincidence!

“The Beach Hotel series itself came about because I was asked, about six years ago, to come up with some new ideas by a literary agent. She liked my writing but didn’t want to take on the book I’d sent her. A few hours before I was due to see her, I came up with the idea of an historical saga set in the Beach Hotel. As I mentioned, it was a real hotel in Littlehampton, which is where I grew up. The hotel was a large, Victorian edifice on the common, close to the beach and not far from my dad’s café, which was by the River Arun. I often passed the hotel as a child and teen, and it was visible from quite a distance, almost like an ever-present character. It was pulled down in the early 1990s so I’m not sure why it occurred to me at that moment, but within an hour I’d created the mysterious Edie Moore, who runs away from her old life to become a chambermaid at the hotel. The agent didn’t take me on, but I wrote A New Start at the Beach Hotel anyway which sparked ideas for other stories in that setting including of course Dark Days.

“The book is historical romance or saga.”