Book dossier

The Dazzle

by Robert Hudson

Sex, drugs, and tuna... The iner-war fast set gathers in 1930s Scarborough to hunt giant tuna. It's going to be murder. Scarborough, 1934. John Fastolf, rakish heir to a Dukedom, has sponsored a glamorous tunny fishing contest. He has his reasons. The young journalist Martha Gellhorn is covering the event for the London gossip papers. She has hers. And quiet little Henny Rosefield has arrived in town with Zane Grey, best-selling author and expert mountain man of the Wild West. The international craze for hunting giant tuna has swept the North Yorkshire coast, and huge yachts have transformed the harbour into something like Monte Carlo. Over them all towers the Dazzle, resplendent in jagged stripes of black, white and blue. She looks like a junior sort of ocean liner but she's a very adult sort of yacht. In the harbour, damaged dilettantes will swap beds and swap lies. Far offshore, on the rips and tides of the malevolent North Sea, gallant battle will be done. All the while, something truly dangerous is lurking. But we can't see any of that. Just the Dazzle sitting on the edge of the world, shimmering as the sea glitters, her outline wavering.