It can be a bit of an embarrassment when your old man is done in. Particularly when you are a rising inspector with CID & hated his guts. Particularly when your old man was at the time subjecting himself to a do-it-yourself version of a Spanish Inquisition torture. & wearing spangled tights. What it meant was that Perry Trethowan had to go back to the home of his ancestors & do a bit of semi-official sleuthing. Like the Sitwells & the Mitfords the Trethowans proved that Birth & Artistic Talent could go together. The Trethowans though made one hope it didnt happen too often. Perrys father had been a dilettante composer so minor that he stopped composing long before he started decomposing. His Uncle Lawrence head of the family was a poet of sorts one of his aunts a stage designer another an overgrown schoolgirl who had never grown out of her Thirties crush on Adolf Hitler. & thats only the older generation. Perry goes with fear & trembling back into the lions den & finds that his worst forebodings are mere shadows of the grisly reality.