I’m working at the moment on the sequel to Poison at Pemberton Hall, provisionally called Death of a Generous Lady. In the course of the research, I stumbled across the fact that Buffalo Bill Cody and his 800-strong team of performers came to Cambridge with their Wild West show in 1904, the year the story is set. I don’t know yet how I can incorporate the great Colonel Cody into the story without him taking over altogether, but I think it will be fun finding out. The show (he never called it a show himself – he thought of it as a historical re-enactment, something educational, not mere spectacle) must have been astonishing in the days before film and tv. The cast brought 500 horses and travelled in three trains. They set up a small tented city wherever they went. Audiences were sometimes 12,000!
