Questions to Dorothy - Introduction

This was a feature that I came up with many years ago when there were still two books to go of the House of Niccolo series, and after thinking about the thirst for answers amongst Dorothy's readers and the resultant pressure on her to answer individual questions.

Dorothy's talks and personal appearances were always popular, usually being composed of a reading from one of the books, a number of anecdotes from her research trips and a question and answer session, but with an ever growing army of fans all over the world there were many who never got the chance to hear her speak or answer their questions. I therefore conceived these pages in an attempt to capture something of the atmosphere of one of these talks.

By inviting questions from the visitors to the site and the online discussion groups, and also providing some of the "standard" answers that often came up, I tried to give readers something of the insight into Dorothy's writing and ideas that they would have got from attending a talk in person.

She was enthusiastic about the idea and readily agreed to respond to the questions. She enjoyed receiving the questions, and seeing her answers was a source of delight for me. They were usually handled in a humourous and somewhat elliptical way that was designed to make the reader think their way through to the correct answer rather than simply providing it as a stated fact.

The questions are divided into four sections: