Julie Welch | Contributors to Slightly Foxed Magazine

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Julie Welch was Fleet Street’s first female football reporter. Her memoir of boarding-school life in the 1960s, Too Marvellous for Words, is published by Simon & Schuster.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [58] 39; [63] 77; [69] 32

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Murder and Walnut Cake

Julie Welch on Hazel Holt’s Mrs Malory crime novels

‘For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.’ This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical) dedication at the front of Mrs Malory Wonders Why was the first clue I had as to how and why Hazel Holt created Sheila Malory. Thank goodness she did. Her stories about a middle-aged widow who solves murder mysteries saw me through a month in 2017 when two of my sons, simultaneously and both on the other side of the world, were seriously ill. Similarly, in March 2020 when it became clear that a pandemic was unavoidable and we had better hunker down or perish, I hunted out my store of Mrs Malories again. Everyone has an author whose work they turn to when it seems like the end of the world as we know it, and Hazel Holt is mine. She is something of a mystery herself, though.

Lost in the Fens

Julie Welch on the detective stories of Edmund Crispin

Should you really never judge a book by its cover? Had I gone along with that dictum years ago I would not have happened upon Edmund Crispin. Shameful though it is to admit it, I was attracted not by the name of the author – unknown to me – but by a Penguin Crime jacket. Its green and cream design caught my eye at an Amnesty International book sale in the church opposite our house. Our dining-room had recently been redecorated, and I judged Frequent Hearses would, suitably displayed, tone with the colour scheme.

Pony-mad

Julie Welch on Ruby Ferguson’s ‘Jill’ books

Ruby Ferguson wrote nine ‘Jill’ books, of which Jill’s Gymkhana is the first. Originally published in 1949 by Hodder & Stoughton, it was beautifully illustrated by ‘Caney’, and priced at 7s 6d. A review by Frances Vivien in the Observer of 9 May that year declared it ‘a perfect pony story for girls’.

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