Murder Most Familiar

"A man does not leave school at fourteen, make a fortune by forty, and go on to become a skilful and powerful politician without ruthlessness."

Business magnate and MP Sir Hugh Mason is the kind of man it is very easy to hate, if you are not susceptible to his particular kind of charm. He has of necessity hurt a lot of people on his way up. Taciturn and enigmatic, even his extended family do not know him well. At a weekend gathering for his sixtieth birthday, it slowly becomes apparent that Sir Hugh plans to give substantial funding and support to a new right-wing political group called the Freemen. But the next morning he is dead of poisoning, and the evidence suggests a family member must be responsible. But who among them would risk such a move, given that Sir Hugh provided for all?

Marjorie Bremner (1916-93) was born in the United States and educated at the University of Chicago and Columbia. A practising psychologist, Bremner was later in the US Naval Reserve and came to London in 1946 to work on a PhD in political science. She did research for the Hansard Society and became a freelance journalist and reviewer for Time and Tide and the Twentieth Century. She wrote two detective novels, Murder Most Familiar (1953) and Murder Amid Proofs (1955).