Weekend at Thrackley
1934 novel

Weekend at Thrackley is a 1934 detective novel by the British writer Alan Melville. A whodunit with comic overtones, it takes the form of a country house mystery, a genre at its height during the decade. His debut novel, it was a commercial success and led to him giving up his job in the timber trade to become a full-time writer. It was reissued in 2018 by the British Library Publishing, as part of a group of crime novels from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Synopsis
Jim Henderson is one of six guests invited by Edwin Carson, an avid collector of precious gems to his gloomy country estate at Thrackley.
Film adaptation
In 1952 it was adapted into the film Hot Ice directed by Kenneth Hume and starring John Justin, Barbara Murray and Ivor Barnard.
References
Bibliography
Clinton, Franz Anthony. British Thrillers, 1950-1979: 845 Films of Suspense, Mystery, Murder and Espionage. McFarland, 2020.
Goble, Alan.
The public source identifies “Weekend at Thrackley” as 1934 novel. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Weekend, Thrackley and novel.
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This entry incorporates text from “Weekend at Thrackley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.