Throwback Thursday: ‘Stella Ryman and the Locked Room Mystery’ by Mel Anastasiou

Great sure is a great word, isn’t it? Both grand and fabulous, tough and talented, it’s one hardworking adjective. So who better than the great Stella Ryman, that feisty and fear-taming sleuth, to take us on a great adventure?

In ‘Stella Ryman and the Locked Room Mystery’ by Mel Anastasiou, Stella comes face to face with a dodgy new character in the corridors of Fairmount Manor and investigates a baffling care home mystery.

Curl up somewhere great, and grab a cup of something greater, and enjoy this excerpt from Issue 23, Summer 2019, which, in case I haven’t mentioned it, is also pretty great!

Stella Ryman and the Locked Room Mystery

by Mel Anastasiou

Chapter One

On this first mid-morning in May, Mrs Stella Ryman could not deny that her amateur sleuthing had today been of a disappointingly mundane variety. At Fairmount Manor Care Home, every day was much like the last, but Stella had successfully deduced that today was a Wednesday. She reminded herself that this was not an entirely useless deduction, for if her friends Thelma Hu, Theo Longbourne, or indeed any member of the Greek Chorus here in Corridor Park wondered what day of the week it was, Stella could clear the matter up for them without betraying their confusion to care workers or to the Director herself. She knew from personal experience how it felt to be labelled gaga, and she had suffered in spades the restrictions in personal freedom and stigma that came with it. Stella had not been allowed outside unsupervised since her arrival at Fairmount four months earlier. 

But she had escaped more than once. And gotten away with it, too. Stella smiled at the memory. But past triumphs were stale bread in the absence of anything new to sink her teeth into. 

This morning she felt edgy and far too hot for comfort. Golden warmth descended through the skylight over her chair in Corridor Park. To Stella’s right, Thelma Hu tapped her cane against the floor in rhythm with her huffing sighs, and to her left the Greek Chorus set down their pillowcase crewel work to fan themselves with their hands.

In long lost days, the elementary school where Stella used to teach would heat up almost unbearably in May, and her youthful library helpers would scoot about the bookshelves and media storage areas in search of the long poles with special metal tips that opened the clerestory windows. In the meantime the sun entered Stella’s library office the way a ticket inspector entered a train car. 

Now she was eighty-two. Stella no longer had an office, just her little bedroom called Room 34. She wondered darkly who now owned all the lovely things she had given up in her pre-Fairmount fit of finality. She had thought she was dying, and so it had seemed right at the time to proceed to a care home with no more worldly goods than a single suitcase full of brand-new coordinating fleece suits and knit tops, a few pairs of socks and underwear, and one faux painting of a farmhouse with ducks and apple trees in bloom, which she had purchased shortly after her eleventh birthday against her mother’s wishes. 

But Stella had not died.

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 23, Summer 2019 here!

And for the first two full-length books, Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries and The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman, visit our bookstore.

Mel Anastasiou writes the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, and the Monument Studios Mysteries. Winner of a Literary Titan Gold award and longlisted for the Leacock Medal, Mel is also the author of two illustrated thirty-day workbooks on story structure: the steampunk-themed The Writer’s Boon Companion and The Writer’s Friend and Confidante. For news on published and upcoming new works, visit her website, melanastasiou.wordpress.com.