Kilmorden Castle

In the novel The Man in the Brown Suit, Kilmorden Castle is a ship sailing from Southampton to Cape Town.

Anne Beddingfeld had encountered a mysterious man "in a brown suit" at a Tube station. He had dropped a note saying "1 7.1 22 Kilmorden Castle". At first she thought it was a castle of some kind but after looking at various reference books, she found that there was no such place. Then by chance she passed a shipping office and saw a model of a liner Kenilworth Castle. In a flash of inspiration she went in and asked for Kilmorden Castle and was told that it would sail shortly from Southampton for Cape Town. She used all her remaining money to buy a first class ticket. What happened next forms the main plot of the book.

Both Kilmorden and Kenilworth are fictional ships. There is an actual Kenilworth but this was built in 1944 long after the novel was written. The names suggest they are ships of the Union-Castle line which had many ships named after castles.