Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared.
Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947.
Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver. Petrzywaski was also middle-aged, a bespectacled reclusive virgin who had worked for 25 years as a ‘hello girl’ on a telephone switchboard, but had recently taken early retirement after she had been bombed out of her London flat in the Blitz and suffered a breakdown.
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