The Ghost of Artemus Strange

Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does... Sir Humphrey has offered to play Father Christmas at the local hospital, but disaster strikes when a boiler breakdown at Batch Hall means he won't be able to buy the sack of toys he'd promised the children. Rupert, a gentleman of the road, is found asleep in an old car in the Hall's coach house. He is scrubbed up and given a room at the Hall, where two guests are already staying: a businessman and his rather young female companion. When money goes missing from their bedroom, Rupert is accused, and Miss Wyndham, the village's amateur sleuth, decides to investigate the matter. Meanwhile, local author Phineas Cook has come up with the idea of a resident ghost at the Hall to attract paying guests. All goes smoothly until the ghostly actors spend too long in the pub one evening and their performance descends into sword-wielding chaos. As always in Batch Magna, events somehow manage to turn out all right in the end - but in the most unexpected manner... AUTHOR: Peter Maughan's early career covered many trades, working on building sites, in wholesale markets, on fairground rides and in a circus. Later he travelled the West Country, picking fruit, and sleeping wherever he could, before moving on to wherever the next road took him. After travelling to Jersey to pick potatoes, he found work in a film studio in its capital, walk-ons and bit parts in the pilot films that were made there, and as a contributing script writer. He studied at the Actor's Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland, subsequently founding a fringe theatre in Barnes, London, and living on a converted sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway. His idyllic, heedless years by the river, inspired him to write the Batch Magna novels, set in a peaceful river valley in the Welsh Marches. He is married and lives currently in Wales.