'Ellin consistently wrote the best mystery stories of his time' Lawrence Block
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The enormously wealthy Durie family occupies a gigantic baroque turn-of-the-century mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The family, whose fortune was established in Colonial times, is traditionally shy of all public notice and proud that no scandal has ever touched its name.
Newly married Michael and Amy Lloyd, bright young teachers in a private school, suddenly find themselves unemployed and apparently unemployable. When all cash and credit are gone, Michael and Amy decide to take up positions on the Durie household staff. But as the Lloyds learn to cope with their positions as servants they slowly become aware that the seventy-year-old matriarch Margaret Durie is, for her own unexplained reasons, enlisting them as her helpless accomplices in a subtly designed series of events that will ultimately lead to a thunderous scandal ... and a ghastly death.
Stanley Ellin was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Brooklyn College. He worked as a teacher, a steelworker and a dairy farmer and served in the US Army in World War Two before becoming a full-time writer in 1946. His first published short story, The Speciality of the House, won him a special Ellery Queen Award. He won two Edgar Awards for short stories, as well as one for The Eighth Circle, and the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière for Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. In 1980 he was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America.
