Jamaica Inn (film) pub on the edge of Bodmin Moor. The score was written by Eric Fenby. In 1819, Jamaica Inn is the headquarters of a gang of wreckers led by the innkeeper Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks). The wreckers are responsible for a series of engineered shipwrecks in which they extinguish coastal warning beacons to cause ships to run aground on the rocky Cornish coast. They then kill the surviving sailors and steal the cargo from the wrecks. The beautiful young Irishwoman Mary Yellan (Maureen O'Hara) is travelling to Jamaica Inn in a carriage, but the driver is afraid to stop there and
Daphne du Maurier Scapegoat", which she partly financed. Du Maurier was often categorised as a "romantic novelist", a term that she deplored, given her novels rarely have a happy ending, and often have sinister overtones and shadows of the paranormal. In this light, she has more in common with the "sensation novels" of Wilkie Collins and others, which she admired. The obituarist Kate Kellaway wrote: "Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers' minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings." Du Maurier's