LIT_Fiction

Author Representation
Literary Estates Management & Administration
Print & Digital Rights
Film & Broadcast Option Rights

The Daughters by Frederic Mullally

TheDaughters-cover_SQ.png

Two young women are determined to confront the royal Duke when he makes a return visit in 1953 to the Bahamas, where he had served as Governor-General during World War Two. Melinda, the exotic and wayward of a Bahamian politician murdered in 1943, has good reasons for believing that the Duke was implicated in the crime and her fevered mind is set upon revenge. Golden-haired Georgina, raised in Bronxville, New York, as the adopted daughter of a middle class American couple, has her own compelling reason for wanting to meet the Duke.

These confrontations form the dramatic climax to a compulsive international story that starts with a British actress’s love affair in the late Twenties with a royal prince, then the world’s most eligible bachelor. From there, Frederic Mullally’s longest and most imaginative novel takes the reader first to New Providence Island, then to Bronxville to observe the blooming of the two singular daughters from childhood to womanhood.

Their natures could hardly be more dissimilar, yet their fates are destined to be entwined through extraordinary circumstances set in motion by three men: the royal Duke, a Canadian newspaper magnate, Max Hunter and a young investigative journalist, Tom Chappell.


About the Author

Mullally's journalism career began in India where, from 1937 to 1949, he was sub-editor on The Statesman of Calcutta, then editor of the Sunday Standard of Bombay. Back in London he worked as a sub-editor of The Financial News, as co-editor of the weekly Tribune,  and finally as political editor and columnist of the Sunday Pictorial. From 1950 to 1955, he headed the public relations firm of Mullally & Warner, with clients ranging from Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Paul Getty, Frankie Laine, the Festival Ballet and Picture Post. Others included; Vera Lynn, Yvonne De Carlo, Guy Mitchell, Sonja Henie, Line Renaud, Johnnie Ray, Jo Stafford, Les Paul and Mary Ford, and the Oxford University Press and its counterpart, Cambridge University Press, as well as the Hulton Press.

Mullally's first novel was the 1958 world best-seller Danse Macabre. This was followed by eleven more titles. His semi-autobiographical novel Clancy was dramatised by BBC TV in five one-hour episodes in 1975 and 1977 under the title Looking for Clancy, starring Robert Powell and Keith Drinkel. Between books, Mullally compiled and wrote with the collaboration with the BBC an album, The Sounds of Time a dramatised history of Britain (1933–45) and the long running Penthouse magazine's strip cartoon "Oh Wicked Wanda!". In 1949 he abandoned a prospective candidature of the Labour Party for the parliamentary constituency of Finchley and Friern Barnet. Late in his life he contributed occasional freelance journalism.