THE private art collection of crime writer Frances Fyfield will be exhibited at Bournemouth's Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in the new year.

A Question of Guilt opens on Saturday January 13 in the newly-refurbished galleries and the audience is asked to look at each painting and imagine the character and motives of the person portrayed.

The award-winning writer has written 24 novels featuring accidental murder, dental horrors, art theft, family feuds and other atrocities. She has also been a collector of oil paintings, portraits and drawings by British artists, from 1890 to 1950.

Based around her eclectic private collection of Bloomsbury/ British Modernist Art, including many anonymous painters, the exhibition is a showcase for British twentieth century art, but it is also styled as a ‘Whodunnit’.

The exhibition runs from January 13 until April 15.