Hugo Vickers: Wallis' tragic tale, Higham and the 'Howling Cunt'

Hugo Vickers: Wally?

Most Esteemed Madame,

So happy to see your blog has returned.

I write to ask: have you perchance had an opportunity to peruse Mr Hugo Vickers' new work Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story Of The Duchess Of Windsor? I'm half-way through and it is a most seriously curious work: more the tragic untold story of its author, who stalked his subject but was never fortunate enough to be granted an audience, and uses the book for a great deal of score-settling.

Author Michael Bloch gets it seriously in the neck, but I for one am left wondering why there is also no mention of Charles Higham whose Wallis bio contained equally racy allegations and was far more successful. Was it because that one was all true? Vickers doesn't say. It's the most puzzling book I've read in ages in terms of begging the question of what is going on in the mind of its author, so I wonder if you are able to shed any light on the matter.

I'm afraid, as per Mr Vickers' other works, it's crafted in an arid manner with reams of useless trivia crying out for an editor's blue pencil. (And for all that, there's still lots that remains unpublished about the Duke: eg that he used to go cruising for sailors in the company of the automobile heir Walter Chrysler Jnr., etc.). One also senses that the author may have come to loathe the late HM the Queen Mother, but is too polite to employ the term 'Howling Cunt'.

Yours,

A Most Puzzled Reader.

P.S. Recently visited NZ. Going As Far was deliciously accurate, and could have Gone Further!

Dear Puzzled Reader

I'm afraid Madame Arcati has read her last book in her present incarnation and, alas, it wasn't a book by Hugo Vickers. I am therefore unable to offer an explanation for his workmanlike foibles or attachment to royal trivia. However, it should not surprise one that the febrile world of royal biography is a carbonated stew of bitterness and revenge: worthy of its own history I'm sure. This, too, shall be a book I avoid.

Ever

Madame Arcati x