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Portrait of Patricia Moyes Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1970)

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Moyes, Patricia

Patricia Moyes was born Patricia Pakenham-Walsh in Dublin, Ireland. She was educated at Overstone School in Northampton 1934–39 and served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War, achieving the rank of flight officer. After the war she was hired by Peter Ustinov as an assistant after which she was assistant editor of English Vogue between 1953 and 1958. She spent a la...

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Literary figures

Arlette van der Valk

Gender: Female

When she was young, she was called Davidson, but the changed her surname after marrying Detective Superintendent Piet Van der Valk in Amsterdam. She is a temperamental, intelligent master-chef and music lover, a minor character in most of the novels about her husband. When he is murdered, Arlette Van der Valk exposes the perpetrator, and then continues as a private detective to solve cases on...

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