Joanna Challis

Joanna Challis places a young Daphne du Maurier at the center of Murder on the Cliffs, the opening volume in the Daphne du Maurier Mysteries. Minotaur Books published the historical mystery in November 2009. Its subtitle is A Mystery Featuring Daphne du Maurier. The Cornwall setting draws Daphne into the secrets of Padthaway, an old coastal estate, after she finds a woman on the rocks below the cliffs. Challis uses the real writer's family background, curiosity, and early literary ambition as foundations for an imagined investigation, while the grand house and isolated shoreline evoke the atmosphere later associated with du Maurier's own fiction. The novel begins a sequence continued by Peril at Somner House and The Villa of Death. Rather than presenting du Maurier as a finished literary celebrity, Challis depicts her near the start of her career, observing social performance and gathering material from place. That approach combines biographical play with a traditional country-house puzzle and a distinctly Cornish sense of landscape.