In her bestselling first book, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective, Susannah Stapleton explored the often comically bizarre world of Miss West, an early 20th-century private investigator whose personal life was as eccentric as her clients. That book revealed Stapleton’s remarkable talent for research and suspense-filled storytelling. Both skills are on display in That Dark Spring, a gripping factual whodunnit set in a lonely hilltop village in Provence. It opens with a dramatic and perplexing murder – or was it suicide? – before leading us back into the early life of Olive Branson, the wayward and sometimes truculent victim. 

Arriving in London as a mixed-race four-year-old – Branson’s mother had died in India, where her chillingly remote father chose to remain – Branson was brought up by loving cousins. Always an outsider, she became a talented artist (one of her drawings of a circus figure, reproduced here, is arrestingly fine), studying under William Orpen and Augustus John. She then followed a travelling circus out to Ireland, perhaps influenced by John’s love of the gypsy life. In her early thirties, after a brief and unconsummated marriage, Branson took to the road again in a caravan before deciding to settle abroad. ‘I have had enough – & more than enough of England,’ she wrote from Provence to her fond and worried aunt May, adding, a little disturbingly: ‘it amuses me to be a Petty Mediaeval Baron here.’

The place where Branson put down roots was Les Baux. No, not the ruined Provencal citadel to which international tourists still flock, but the village that clusters below it, where traditional life – valley farmers in heavy chestnut cloaks, old ladies in thick black skirts and elaborate headdresses – once