Margot Bennett’s THE WIDOW OF BATH Part One: Shady goings-on in Ramsgate

The Curiously Specific Book Club

A young man with a questionable background is sitting in a small hotel by an unnamed harbour in England. He is ostensibly writing a review. Behind him he hears a party of unseen people come into the hotel restaurant. He knows their voices. They are people from his past. One of them, he had a love affair with. She is now married to a judge. The judge’s name is Bath.

So begins Margot Bennett’s perfectly calibrated 1952 thriller THE WIDOW OF BATH. But where is this strange hotel? All Bennett tells us directly is that this is ‘not Bournemouth.’ Thankfully, there are other clues – more than enough for us to get our teeth into.

And so we take you to Ramsgate on the Kent coast, our candidate for the book’s location. We discover a past filled with suspicious waiters, terrible food, and eternal controversies about immigration. When it comes to immigration, we find nothing much has changed.

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