Violet Willett

In the novel The Sittaford Mystery, Violet Willett is the daughter of Mrs Willett. She and her mother had recently come from South Africa and rented Sittaford House in fairly unusual circumstances--taking a remote house on Dartmoor for the winter.

Violet and her mother were not considered plausible suspects for the murder of Captain Trevelyan as they were at Sittaford House. However, the journalist Charles Enderby did find her having a secret meeting with Brian Pearson. Subsequent investigations also showed that Brian had sailed from Melbourne on a Blue Funnel ship, the Phidias, but no mother and daughter pair came on board at Cape Town as claimed. Instead there was a mother and daughter pair, the Johnsons, from Melbourne, who answered to the description of Mrs Willett and Violet.

Her suspicious behaviour is only explained at the end when she admitted to Emily Trefusis that she was the daughter of a Dartmoor prison convict Freemantle Freddy. Violet had met Brian on the Phidias from Melbourne and they had become engaged. She and Brian had come to Dartmoor to help engineer the escape of her father. The escape attempt had failed and her father died from pneumonia but Violet thought it was probably the best thing for him. Despite the failure of their plans, Violet considered herself happy and lucky because she had Brian.