Murder in Blue

Author was a bank clerk by day and a novelist by night

A new edition of Murder in Blue
was published in 2021

Clifford Witting, who was born on this day in 1907, 115 years ago today, in Lewisham in Kent, was one of the younger of the Golden Age mystery writers. He worked as a clerk for Lloyds Bank during the day and wrote 16 detective novels in the evenings, between 1937 and 1964.

His first novel, Murder in Blue, was republished in 2021 by Galileo Publishers, making it available again for present day fans of vintage detective stories to read and enjoy. The novel was written while Witting was commuting to London for his day job and he would work on it every night, despite the distractions of becoming a young father.

Witting set a lot of his mysteries in the small town of Paulsfield in the county of Downshire behind the South Downs, which was based on the town of Petersfield in Hampshire. He included many details about Petersfield as it was in the 1930s, even describing the statue of King William III mounted on a horse that stands in the market place, although in the fictional town of his novel, he says it is the statue of a local lord.  

He had a flair for describing settings and wrote in a witty style. He also experimented with the conventions of the detective story, showing his fascination with the genre.

His protagonist in Murder in Blue, John Rutherford, runs a bookshop that stocks detective fiction. He employs a young assistant, George, who is fascinated with whodunits and is thrilled when his employer becomes involved in a real-life murder case.

Rutherford is out walking one evening when he discovers the body of a young police officer lying in a lane on the outskirts of the town. The police officer appears to have been bludgeoned to death. Rutherford tries to think quickly and uses what he believes to be the police officer’s bicycle to cycle to the police station and report the tragedy.

Clifford Witting worked as
a bank clerk by day

He is later taken back to the scene of the crime by the investigating officer, Inspector Charlton, so that he can point out the tracks he himself has left in the sodden ground and help the Inspector identify any clues that have been left by the murderer. He is also called to give evidence at the inquest and soon becomes on friendly terms with the detective.

The story is given additional interest by the complication that Rutherford has recently fallen in love with a beautiful young woman after their cars collided in the fog. A love interest in a detective story was frowned on in those days by other Golden Age writers, but in Murder in Blue it is an additional source of suspense for the reader. I found myself wondering how the relationship would turn out and whether it would have anything to do with the murder.

Witting’s two series characters, Sergeant - later Inspector - Peter Bradford and Inspector Harry Charlton, appear in most of his 16 books.

During World War II, Witting served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery and a Warrant Officer in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He joined the Detection Club in 1958, 11 years after the original publication of Murder in Blue, at a time when Agatha Christie was the president. Witting died in 1968 in Surrey.

Newspaper critics of the time gave his books good reviews, saying he produced interesting puzzles with ingenious solutions and that he played fair with the reader. I would definitely recommend Murder in Blue, as I think it is a good read and keeps up the whodunit element well. The novel also provides an interesting snapshot of life at the time it was set. 

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The Man in the Queue

The novel that introduces the likeable but fallible Inspector Alan Grant

The Arrow edition of The
Man in the Queue

A man is found with a stiletto in his back, having been stabbed to death while queueing for the last night of a popular West End show. The main problems for Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, who is deployed to investigate the killing, are the lack of clues to the victim’s identity and the fact that no one in the queue seems to have seen what happened.

The Man in the Queue, the first detective novel by Josephine Tey, was published in 1929, just eight years after Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and six years after Dorothy L Sayers published her first novel, Whose Body?

But unlike Poirot and Wimsey, Alan Grant is a detective by profession and not an amateur sleuth. The novel is an early version of a police procedural and shows Grant interacting with his superiors and subordinates and making use of the forensic tools the police had at their disposal in the 1920s to try to solve the case.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by the writer Elizabeth MacIntosh, who was born in 1896 in Scotland. She trained as a Physical Training instructor and taught at schools in Scotland and England. In 1923 she returned to her family home in Inverness to care for her invalid mother and keep house for her father and it was then that she began writing.

The Man in the Queue was her first mystery novel and introduced her series detective, Inspector Alan Grant. It was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize after it was published in America.

MacIntosh’s main ambition was to write a play that would have a run in the West End and her drama, Richard of Bordeaux, was such a success when it was first staged in 1932 that it was transferred to the New Theatre, now the Noel Coward Theatre, where it had a year-long run and made a household name of its young leading man, John Gielgud.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym
used by Elizabeth MacIntosh

As Josephine Tey, MacIntosh produced six novels featuring Alan Grant. The fifth novel, The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, was voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers Association in 1990.    

There is a lot to like about The Man in the Queue. There are beautiful descriptions of Tey’s native Inverness, where she sends Grant in pursuit of a suspect. All the characters, police and suspects alike, are interesting and believable. Grant is a well-rounded policeman, not just a caricature, who is looked after by his landlady, dines regularly at a French restaurant, and is popular with the ladies, making me keen to read the next book in the series, A Shilling for Candles.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the novel is the clever plot. Like other writers of the period, Tey is not afraid to show Grant arresting the wrong man and feeling dissatisfied with his solution. She also manages to keep the true identity of the murderer a secret right up to the end.  

The Man in the Queue was republished by Arrow Books in 2011.

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Bats in the Belfry by E C R Lorac

Remembering an early writer of the police procedural

The British Library Crime
Classics edition

Bats in the Belfry, the 13th novel in the series featuring Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard by E C R Lorac, has a complex plot with the focus on the way detectives in the 1930s used standard police procedure to solve cases.

First published in 1937, the novel may seem rather dated in 2022, but it is fast moving and presents a challenging puzzle for the reader. It was reissued in 2018 by the British Library in their Crime Classics series and is now also available in large print.

Bats in the Belfry is the story of a failed novelist and his wife, a successful actress, who lead separate lives in their smart house in London. When the husband is called away suddenly to Paris, he seems to disappear completely. His suitcase and passport are later found in a sinister artist’s studio, the Belfry, in a dilapidated house in Notting Hill.

The novelist’s friends set out to investigate what has happened to him but find things at the Belfry are so sinister they decide to enlist the help of the police and Chief Inspector Macdonald, already an established series character, takes over the case.

By the time Lorac wrote Bats in the Belfry, she was an experienced writer of whodunnits and had developed the skill of being able to shift suspicion from one character to another while keeping up the interest for the reader.

The opening scene introduces most of the characters who will play a central part in the story. They have gathered together following a funeral and before long the conversation turns to the subject of how to dispose of a body. This conversation contains a vital clue for those alert enough to spot and remember it…

E C R Lorac was the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett, who died 64 years ago today. She wrote under the pseudonyms E C R Lorac, Carol Carnac and Mary Le Bourne during the Golden Age of Detective fiction. 

Lorac chose her pseudonym because it was the name Carol, which was part of her name, spelt backwards. Her first detective novel, Murder on the Burrows, which introduced Chief Inspector Macdonald, was published in 1931 when she was 37. She wrote 48 mysteries as E C R Lorac and 23 as Carol Carnac along with other novels, short stories and radio and stage plays, before her death in 1958.  

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Sweet Danger by Margery Allingham

Campion meets a flame-haired beauty who is a most unconventional heroine

A Vintage Books edition
of Sweet Danger

There is the first sign of a love interest for the mysterious Albert Campion in Sweet Danger, the fifth novel written by Margery Allingham about her hero’s adventures.

Campion meets the plucky Amanda Fitton, a beautiful teenage girl, who works with him to thwart a deadly enemy intent on defrauding her family of its inheritance. The novel is full of action, danger and eccentric characters and ends with the most delicate of hints that there might be romance in the future for the noble adventurer, Campion.

Sweet Danger was first published in 1933 in the UK. However, it is not a typical novel of its time. Amanda Fitton is not a damsel in distress for Campion to rescue. She is a hard-up and not very well dressed 17-year-old, who is interested in experimenting with radio signals and electricity.

Campion has been tasked by the British Government with finding proof of ownership of Averna, a small, oil rich principality on the Adriatic, which has become a vital port after an earthquake has given it a natural harbour. He goes to the village of Pontisbright in the depths of the Sussex countryside, where he meets Amanda and her family who, as rightful heirs to the principality, insist on joining Campion’s quest.

Although Campion and his friends agree to join forces with the Fitton family, whose ancestors were given the principality way back in history, an unscrupulous financier and his hired thugs are also on the trail. The family suffer violent attacks and Campion’s friends are tied up in sacks and shot at, while Campion himself goes missing.

During a showdown with the main villain, Amanda saves Campion’s life, but she has been shot herself in the process. Thankfully, her wound is not life threatening and in the last pages of the book she asks him to take her into partnership in his business ‘later on’…

Allingham's writing was notable
for her insight into character

In 2022, Sweet Danger might seem like a far-fetched story to modern crime fiction fans, but I think it is well written and a gripping page-turner and still worth reading.

Margery Allingham, who died on this day in 1966, was a prolific writer during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. She left a legacy of 18 Albert Campion mysteries, six volumes of short stories about the detective and many stand-alone novels, novellas and volumes of short stories.

Margery died of cancer in hospital in Colchester six weeks after her 62nd birthday. She was in the process of writing her last novel, Cargo of Eagles, and had mapped out the story long before her death. Her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, was able to finish it, as she herself would have done, following her plan.

In a preface to Mr Campion’s Clowns, an omnibus of novels by Margery Allingham, published in 1967, Youngman Carter paid tribute to his late wife as ‘a generous, kind and courageous woman with a rare gift for friendship’.

Margery showed wonderful insight into character and her books abound in witty and accurate observations of people. As she matured as a writer, her books became deeper and started to encompass significant themes, such as love and justice, good and evil, and illusion and truth. Her works have now attained classic status and she has, at times been compared with Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson

Vintage Books, part of the Penguin Random House Group, have now republished all Margery’s novels featuring her series detective Albert Campion.

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Dame Ngaio Marsh had a lifetime love of the theatre

A detective novelist who brilliantly describes backstage life
 

Ngaio Marsh, who was one of the leading female detective novelists of her time, died on this day – 18 February – in 1982 in her native New Zealand.

Ngaio began writing detective novels in 1931 after moving to London to start up an interior decorating business.  Stuck in her basement flat on a very wet Saturday afternoon she decided to have a go at writing a detective story and came up with the idea for her sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective.

Ngaio Marsh came to be seen as
one of the Queens of Crime

She sat down to write what was to be the first of a series of 32 crime novels featuring Alleyn, who she named after an Elizabethan actor, Edward Alleyn. Her detective was to work for the Metropolitan Police in London, even though he is the younger brother of a baronet.

Her second novel, Enter a Murderer, published in 1935, and several others, are set in the world of the theatre, which Ngaio knew well as she was also an actress, director and playwright at times during her life.

After leaving school she had studied painting before joining a touring theatre company. She became a member of an art association in New Zealand and continued to exhibit her paintings with them from the 1920s onwards.

Ngaio allows her detective, Alleyn, to meet and fall in love with an artist, Agatha Troy, in her 1938 novel, Artists in Crime.

She directed many productions of Shakespeare’s plays in New Zealand and Australia and the 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand is named in her honour.

In her 1946 short story, I Can Find My Way Out, which features Alleyn, Ngaio once again uses the theatre as her setting. A new playwright, Anthony Gill, is waiting nervously for the premiere of his first play at The Jupiter Theatre in London.

The female lead, Coralie Bourne, has been kind to him and advised him on his play, but the male lead, Canning Cumberland, is known to have a drinking problem and can be unpredictable, which worries Gill. Two of the other actors also resent Cumberland, one because he was given the best part and the other because he was given the best dressing room.

Meanwhile, Roderick Alleyn and his now wife Troy are entertaining a friend, Lord Michael Lamprey, for dinner. He is keen to join the police but his conversation with Alleyn is constantly interrupted by phone calls that are actually meant for a delivery firm. When one of the callers asks if they can deliver a suitcase to playwright  Anthony Gill at the Jupiter Theatre, Lord Michael thinks it would be fun to take the job as he has been unable to get a ticket to see the play.

Sophie Hannah's collection of
stories is published by Apollo

Before he reaches the theatre, the case falls open and he discovers a false ginger beard and moustache, a black hat, a black overcoat with a fur collar and a pair of black gloves.

On an impulse Lord Michael puts the whole outfit on and insists on being allowed to deliver the case in person to the playwright backstage.

As Coralie makes one of her exits from the stage, she sees him standing in the wings wearing the beard and black clothes and faints. The male lead, Cumberland, also reacts with horror when he sees him and locks himself in his dressing room.

Lord Michael continues to watch the play from the wings with fascination, although he becomes increasingly aware of the smell of gas. Eventually, he traces the smell to one of the dressing rooms, gains access and drags out the unconscious occupant, but sadly it is too late to save him.

He rings Alleyn and the detective arrives at the theatre with his men, where it does not take him long to discover that one of the actors has been murdered.

In just 18 pages, Ngaio sets up the story, establishes the characters and their relationships, brilliantly describes the dressing rooms, equipment and atmosphere backstage, drawing on her experience of the theatre, and allows Alleyn to solve the crime.

I Can Find My Way Out is among a collection of stories chosen by the author Sophie Hannah entitled Deadlier: 100 of the Best Crime Stories Written by Women. The compilation is also available in hardback. 

Along with her fellow Queens of Crime, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio was to dominate the genre of crime fiction from the 1930s onwards with her novels, short stories and plays.

In 1948 Ngaio was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in connection with drama and literature in New Zealand. She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts in the 1966 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Ngaio’s autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew was published in 1965. She was inducted into the Detection Club in 1974 and received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement as a detective novelist from the Mystery Writers of America.

Her 32nd and final Alleyn novel, Light Thickens, was completed only a few weeks before her death. The story revolves around one of her greatest theatrical passions, Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth.

Ngaio died in her home town of Christchurch and was buried at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Mount Peel.

The Ngaio Marsh Award is given annually to the writer of the best New Zealand mystery, crime or thriller novel. Her home in Christchurch is now a museum and displays her collection of antiques. On her desk lies her fountain pen filled with green ink, which was her preferred writing tool.

Ngaio Marsh’s 32 Roderick Alleyn crime novels and her collections of short stories are available in a variety of formats from or

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The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell

Sleepy village provides interesting material for Freud follower Mrs Bradley

The Saltmarsh Murders was
the fourth Mrs Bradley mystery

The Vicar’s maid is strangled only a few days after giving birth to an illegitimate baby that no one has ever seen in The Saltmarsh Murders, the fourth novel to feature the psychoanalyst and amateur detective Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.

Conveniently, Mrs Bradley is staying at the Manor House in the village of Saltmarsh, as a guest of the local squire and she is only too happy to lend a hand with the murder inquiry.

As a professional psychiatrist and follower of Freud, Mrs Bradley finds a wealth of interesting cases in the village to test her theories on. She encounters a female resident who believes everyone in the village is some kind of animal and meets the bizarre inhabitants of a remote bungalow who have imprisoned their neighbour in the crypt of the church.

The story is told from the point of view of the young curate, Noel Wells, who lives at the vicarage and is in love with Daphne, the Vicar’s niece.

Mrs Bradley adopts Noel as her ‘Watson’, asking him to introduce her to some of the families in the village and also to provide her with secretarial assistance.

Noel is both terrified and fascinated by Mrs Bradley. He admires her brains and beautiful voice, but he hates being prodded in the ribs by her yellowed talons and is unnerved by her sinister cackle. Seeing Mrs Bradley through his eyes, when he does not completely understand her theories or why she is behaving the way she does, is amusing and also a clever device by Gladys Mitchell to keep the mystery going until the end of the book.

Some of the Mrs Bradley novels
were adapted as a BBC TV series

Mrs Bradley’s investigation uncovers a smuggling racket and involves a corpse going missing, the vicar being locked up in the village pound and an exhumation being ordered, before peace can be restored to the sleepy village of Saltmarsh.

The book reveals a lot of interesting detail about life in England at the beginning of the 1930s. As a schoolteacher, Gladys is able to portray children and young people very well and, as in her first three books, she uses them as main characters.

Gladys wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Bradley, as well as mystery novels under the pen name Malcolm Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the pen name Stephen Hockaby.

She got off the mark in 1929 with Speedy Death, which introduced Mrs Bradley, and she never looked back, writing at least one novel a year throughout her career and gradually building a large and loyal following for her eccentric but brilliant detective.

Gladys was an early member of The Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton and Dorothy L Sayers, but frequently satirised or reversed the traditional patterns of the genre in her novels.

In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but continued to write. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976.

The last Mrs Bradley mystery was published in 1984, the year after the author’s death in Corfe Mullen, a village in Dorset.

The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell was first published in 1932 but has been republished by Vintage Books and is now available as a paperback or Kindle edition.

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Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh

An unusual setting for a 1936 detective novel with a closed circle of suspects

Death in Ecstasy is available as
part of a Ngaio Marsh collection

When bored journalist Nigel Bathgate attends a meeting of a dubious spiritual cult just out of curiosity, he gets more entertainment than he bargained for. As he watches a group of people at the altar pass round a silver flagon of wine, he sees one of them drink from a jewelled cup and then immediately fall dead to the floor.

At first the other initiates think the young female victim is experiencing ecstasy, but then one of them notices her clenched teeth and ‘lips drawn back in a rigid circle’ and makes the others aware that she is dead. Nigel keeps his nerve amid the panic and asks to use the telephone to ring his close friend, Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard.

Alleyn and Bathgate soon discover that the victim, Cara Quayne, a beautiful and wealthy young woman, was a deeply religious initiate who had been training for a month for the bizarre ceremony of becoming the Chosen Vessel at the House of the Sacred Flame.

Nigel’s suspicions had been aroused by the distinctive smell coming from the victim, who had died immediately after drinking the ritual wine. He and Alleyn quickly discover that the wine had been poisoned with cyanide.

As Bathgate was present when the death occurred, Alleyn allows the journalist full access to the investigation, allowing him to take notes while he questions the witnesses. He also encourages Bathgate, who in many of the novels serves as Alleyn’s ‘Watson’, to befriend  a young couple who were present at the altar when the murder took place.  This would of course not happen in real life, or modern detective novels, but I think the author can get away with it because the story was written more than 80 years ago.

The actor Geoffrey Keen played Marsh's
detective Roderick Alleyn in TV adaptation

Alleyn takes the names of all the people who were with Cara at the altar. They are all suspects because any of them could have added the cyanide to the wine as they passed the flagon round. And at the top of the list is Father Jasper Garnette, the officiating priest.

This fourth Detective Chief Inspector Alleyn mystery by Ngaio Marsh, published in 1936, is a departure from the country house mystery that was so fashionable at the time. But it has a limited circle of suspects, as they are all middle-class people living in flats and houses in an upmarket area of London, who pay calls on each other and dine with each other.

Alleyn and Bathgate uncover the usual motives for murder, such as lust, jealousy, greed for money and unrequited love. They come across a significant clue when they find a book hidden in Father Garnette’s bookcase that falls open at a page with a recipe for home made cyanide. Ngaio is very clever with this clue, which keeps the identity of the murderer hidden until the end, and she provides enough twists along the way to distract the reader.

I would recommend Death in Ecstasy because it is a well written, satisfying puzzle that reveals more about the character of Ngaio’s series detective, Roderick Alleyn. 

Death in Ecstasy was adapted for television in 1964 with Geoffrey Keen in the Alleyn role, Keith Barron as Bathgate, Joss Ackland as Jasper Garnette and Nigel Hawthorne as a temple doorkeeper. 

One of three novels featured in Book Two of a Ngaio Marsh Collection published by Harper Collins, it is available from or

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Police at the Funeral

Campion uses his detection skills and solves the mystery before the cops

The cover of the newest
available edition

Mr Albert Campion is asked by Joyce, the fiancée of one of his friends, to trace a distant relative she calls Uncle Andrew, who has gone missing from the house in Cambridge where they both live.

But before Campion and Joyce have even left London for Cambridge, they find out that the body of Uncle Andrew has been found in a river. He had been bound hand and foot with cord and shot in the head.

In this fourth novel to feature the mysterious Mr Campion, the author, Margery Allingham, allows hints to be dropped by one of the characters that Campion is from a prominent British aristocratic family, giving the reader a tantalising clue about who he really is.

Campion takes Joyce back to Socrates Close, the large old house where she lives with her Great Aunt, Caroline Faraday, the widow of a famous Cambridge academic, and the other members of the strange and dysfunctional family, who she helps Mrs Faraday to take care of.

Then Campion goes to see his old friend Marcus Featherstone, who is a solicitor and Joyce’s fiancé, to get some background about the case. When Marcus asks for his professional assistance, Campion says: ‘I must warn you. I’m no detective, but of course I’m open to help. What d’you think I can do for you exactly?’ This is interesting because although we see him go on to use his skills to solve the murder, he clearly does not see himself as a detective.

From the previous novels, we know that Campion is well-educated, with quiet authority and that he is not afraid to put himself in danger to help others. He lives above a police station in London with an eccentric manservant and is reputed to be a good man to call upon in a crisis. He appears to be more of a gentleman adventurer than a private detective.

Nevertheless, he goes to Socrates Close to meet the formidable Caroline Faraday, who, because she thinks she knows his family, invites him to stay.

He uses his skill and experience to work out what is going on at Socrates Close when a second member of the family dies and another one is injured while they are both still inside the house.

Peter Davison played Campion in a BBC TV
adaptation of Margery Allingham's novels

Campion follows up the clues he finds, such as the mysterious symbol drawn on the outside of one of the library windows and a huge footprint found in the flower bed below.

Although he works alongside his policeman friend, Stanislaus Oates, a senior Scotland Yard detective, it is Campion who works out what has been happening in the house and exposes the person responsible.

Police at the Funeral, the fourth Campion novel, was published in Britain in 1931 and is the first of the series not to have organised crime as a plot element. Instead, it is about a wealthy family living together in a big house who are constantly having petty squabbles. It is the first real detective story by Margery and is considered by many of her readers to be one of her best novels. 

She was later judged to be one of the four Queens of Crime, along with her contemporaries, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, who were also writing during the Golden Age of detective fiction.

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The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

A well-plotted novel that offers a glimpse of life after the First World War

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona
Club is the fourth Wimsey novel

The fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, begins with Wimsey chatting with an acquaintance, Captain George Fentiman, in the bar of the Bellona Club on the evening of Armistice Day. 

They joke about the club being like a morgue or funeral parlour, recalling a cartoon in the humorous magazine, Punch, in which an elderly member of a gentleman’s club summons a waiter to remove a fellow member from his chair on the grounds that he had been “dead for two days”.

Fentiman points out that his grandfather, General Fentiman, comes in every morning at 10 am, collects the Morning Post, settles into the armchair by the fire and becomes part of the furniture until the evening.

When Wimsey’s dinner companion, Colonel Marchbanks, arrives he goes to speak to General Fentiman who is still in his chair by the fire. He comes back to Wimsey and tells him something ‘rather unpleasant’ has happened.

It transpires that while they have been joking at the bar, old General Fentiman really was dead in his chair. A doctor is called and says rigor mortis is already well established.

Most of the action in the novel, first published in London in 1928, takes place in the fictional club for war veterans that Sayers has invented.

Doctor Penberthy, General Fentiman’s personal physician, certifies death by natural causes but is unable to give the exact time of his passing. This turns out to be rather crucial.  As it happens, his wealthy sister had died on the morning of Armistice Day. If she had passed away first, the General would have inherited her fortune, which would then be left to his grandsons, Captain George and Major Robert Fentiman, who could both do with the money.

The brothers ask Wimsey to investigate, because unless they can prove that the General died after his sister, the entire fortune would go to her young, female companion.

Sayers was short of money
until her novels took off

The novel paints an interesting picture of life in Britain after the First World War. Captain George Fentiman is still suffering from post-traumatic stress and his physical injuries have left him unable to work. He is dependent on his wife keeping them both on her earnings from a low-paid job and they are having to live in uncomfortable lodgings.

He is bitter that all he has been given by his country is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, and yet serving in the war has cost him his job, his income and his good health.

Sayers herself knew what it was like to live on a low income in London between the wars and did not become prosperous until her Lord Peter Wimsey novels became a success. 

There was a time when she was so hard up and short of money for food she considered taking a job as a teacher. Finally, in her 30th year, she sold the detective novel she had been working on in her spare time, Whose Body? which introduces Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sayers herself said of her creation of Wimsey: ’At the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly… I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes.’

Once Wimsey has started his investigation on behalf of the brothers, he finds establishing the time of the General’s death difficult. Unusually, no one saw the old man arrive at the Club on the morning of Armistice Day and can swear to him having been alive at that point. Eventually, Wimsey has to have the body exhumed and re-examined.

After discovering that the General had been poisoned, Wimsey tracks down the murderer, who then shoots himself in the Bellona Club library.

More unpleasantness for the members of the club to complain about!

This fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel from Dorothy L Sayers, who was, in her day, judged to be one of the Queens of Crime, is definitely worth reading.

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The many talents of C H B Kitchin

Barrister turned crime writer offered readers a snapshot of 1920s life

C H B Kitchin, whose skill as a writer
was only one of many talents

Many people enjoy Golden Age crime stories because, along with a good mystery, they give the reader glimpses of what life was like in the early part of the last century.

Experts agree that one writer with a particular talent for evoking the era in which his stories were set is C H B Kitchin, a barrister who became wealthy from playing the stock market, and also tried his hand at detective fiction.

Born in October 1895, Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin was the son of a barrister who, after an Oxford education, became a barrister himself.

As well as being a gifted chess and bridge player and a pianist, Kitchin wrote poetry, general fiction and four highly-regarded crime novels featuring the stockbroker turned amateur sleuth, Malcolm Warren.

His first crime novel, Death of My Aunt, published in 1929, has been reprinted frequently and translated into several foreign languages. It was republished by Faber Finds in 2009, 80 years after its first appearance.

The novel introduces the young stockbroker, Malcolm Warren, who is summoned by telegram to visit his rich, old Aunt Catherine. She has recently shocked the family by marrying a muscular garage owner, who is many years her junior. She wants Warren to look at her investments and he is hopeful of being able to advise her on what to buy and to make a small profit for himself.

He hurries to her bedside, but before he can start discussing her investment book with her, his aunt asks him to pass her a new bottle of tonic that she wants to try. After taking a sip, she leans back and closes her eyes, but suddenly becomes violently ill and dies.

The Faber Finds edition of 
Death of My Aunt

Her fortune is divided up in her will to go to various members of her family, who would all be happy for either the young stockbroker, or the new husband, to be accused of her murder.

Therefore, Warren has to launch his own investigation in order to save himself, and his uncle by marriage, who he likes and can’t believe is guilty of the murder.

Kitchin makes his hero, Warren, a fan of detective fiction himself and he mentions that he admires the crime writers Edgar Wallace and Lynn Brock. Warren tries to emulate Lyn Brock’s methods and draws up a table of suspects and motives and allocates each of them points for being the most likely person to have committed the murder.

In a later book, Death of His Uncle, Kitchin, through his hero Warren, says: ‘A good detective story, I have found, is often a clearer mirror of ordinary life than many a novel written specially to portray it. Indeed, I think a test of its goodness is the pleasure you can derive from it even though you know who the murderer is. A historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books or statistics, but to detective stories, if he wished to study the manners of his age.

In 2021 we can be those historians and enjoy the fascinating domestic details and descriptions of servants, houses, furniture and dinners, which Kitchin, through Warren,  reveals.

The writer H R F Keating writes in his Introduction to the 2009 edition of Death of My Aunt: ‘Kitchin’s knowledge of the crevices of human nature lifts his crime fiction out of the category of puzzledom and into the realm of the detective novel. He was, in short, ahead of his day.’

I would recommend Death of My Aunt to anyone who enjoys reading classic detective stories, as it is a well-written and interesting novel of its time, which provides a satisfying, credible solution to the mystery at the end.

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Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth

Who came first: Miss Silver or Miss Marple?

Grey Mask, originally published in 1928,
was republished 90 years later

Patricia Wentworth’s first Miss Silver Mystery, Grey Mask, published in 1928, introduces an unassuming little old lady, who is continually knitting baby garments, but is actually a shrewd private detective with a brilliant mind.

Many people have assumed over the years that Miss Silver was inspired by Agatha Christie’s much-loved Miss Marple, but actually it could have been the other way round. The first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, was not published until 1930, although the endearing character had made her first appearance in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927.

Whoever came first, the two old ladies might appear to be similar characters, but there are many differences between them. Miss Marple lives in a cottage in a sleepy village but is more worldly wise than she might appear. She has developed  a deep knowledge of human nature and can always refer to a useful village parallel when investigating a case, possessing the ability to pick out a villain because he reminds her of a young man that she once knew who stole from his employer, or a naughty boy who often played tricks on his teachers.

Miss Silver, however, is the real deal, as she walks the mean streets of London and takes on cases in a professional way, pitting her wits against major crime bosses.

In Grey Mask there is little explanation about who Miss Silver is, or why she has set herself up as a private investigator in London in the 1920s, but she appears to be well known in upper class circles and the hero of the story is sent to consult her on the recommendation of a friend.

Charles Moray, an explorer, has returned home after four years abroad, to find  his house unlocked, with a light burning in one of its abandoned rooms. He finds somewhere to hide and eavesdrops on what is going on in the room. A criminal gang are using his house to plot a vicious crime. Furthermore, he recognises the voice of one of the conspirators. It belongs to the woman who jilted him on the eve of his wedding four years earlier.

Patricia Wentworth wrote
32 Miss Silver novels

He cannot go to the police because he does not want his former fiancée to get into trouble, but he has to find a way to prevent the gang from committing the crime they are planning and somehow extricate the woman he used to love from the mess she seems to be in.

His friend urges him to consult Miss Silver and so Charles goes to her office. His first impression of the well-respected private detective is that she is ‘a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy mouse-coloured hair done in a large bun at the back of her head’. He finds that appearances can be deceptive, however, and that Miss Silver is not afraid to tackle a criminal gang who are prepared to resort to violence, kidnapping and shooting people.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen name of Dora Amy Elles, who was born in India, where her father was stationed with the British Army, in 1877. She was sent to England to be educated, but returned to India and married George Dillon in 1906. He had three children from a previous marriage and they had one child together. After his death she moved back to England with the children.

In 1920 she married again, to George Turnbull, and settled in Surrey. She had begun writing while in India and in 1910 had won the Melrose Prize for her first published novel, A Marriage Under the Terror, which was set during the French Revolution.

Under the pen name of Patricia Wentworth, she wrote 32 crime novels featuring Miss Silver, beginning with Grey Mask in 1928 and ending with Girl in the Cellar in 1961, the year of her death. Miss Silver develops as a character during the series and works closely with Scotland Yard. The reader will eventually discover she is a retired governess with a passion for Tennyson as well as for knitting.

Patricia Wentworth also wrote poetry and more than 30 other novels throughout her career.

I would recommend reading Grey Mask, which was republished by Hodder and Stoughton in 2018 and is available again in some public libraries. It is a well-written story told from multi viewpoints and, although it is typical of the sensational crime fiction of its time, such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence novels and Margery Allingham’s Mr Campion books, it has an intriguing mystery at its heart, which is not revealed until the end.

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The Baroness behind the Scarlet Pimpernel

Aristocrat also thought to have created the first female fictional detective

Baroness Orczy was from an 
aristocratic family in Hungary

British novelist and playwright Baroness Orczy, who is best known for creating the character of the Scarlet Pimpernel but also wrote several collections of detective short stories, was born on September 23, 1865 in Tarnaörs, a village in central Hungary, about 100km (62 miles) from the capital, Budapest.

Emma Magdolina Rozalia Maria Jozefa Borbala Orczy de Orci was the daughter of aristocratic parents, but when she was just three years old the family had to leave their estate because of fears of a peasant revolt. They came to live in London when Emma was 14, where she later attended art school.

There she met Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow, the son of an English clergyman, who was an illustrator. They were married in 1894 and to supplement her husband’s low earnings, Emma started working as a translator and illustrator. After their only son was born, she wrote her first novel, which was not a success. She then wrote a series of detective stories for the Royal Magazine under the name Baroness Orczy and acquired a small following.

In 1903, she and her husband wrote a play based on one of her short stories about an English aristocrat, Sir Percy Blakeney, who in his guise as the Scarlet Pimpernel, rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. The play was accepted for production in the West End and ran for four years. It was translated and staged in other countries, generating huge success for Baroness Orczy’s subsequent novel featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Baroness Orczy wrote several other plays, collections of shorts stories, and about 50 novels. Eventually she became so financially successful she and her husband were able to buy a villa in Monte Carlo.

Elvi Hale as Lady Molly in
The Woman in the Big Hat

One of her famous detective characters was Molly Robertson-Kirk, who first appeared in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, a collection of short stories published in 1910 and probably the first book to feature a female detective as the main character. Lady Molly, like Miss Marple who was to come more than 20 years later, was a successful sleuth because she recognised domestic clues that were outside the experience of male detectives. The stories are narrated by Lady Molly’s female assistant, Mary Granard, who was perhaps the first female ‘Watson’.

I was delighted to come across a Lady Molly story from the 1910 collection recently in The Giant Book of Great Detective Stories edited by Herbert Van Thal.

In The Woman in the Big Hat, Lady Molly and her assistant, Mary, are having tea together in Lyons, when they notice a crowd of people forming outside the café on the opposite side of the road. Lady Molly is quick to join them and succeeds in gaining entrance to the café to view the cause of the commotion, which is the dead body of a customer. This is fortuitous as she soon receives a message saying Scotland Yard will require her assistance. She is told that there is a woman suspect in the case and they will ‘rely on her a great deal’.

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
is available as a paperback

The police doctor says the man has been poisoned and Lady Molly questions one of the waitresses, who tells her the victim had been having tea with a woman in a big hat. Scotland Yard think they have discovered the identity of the woman and question her, but Lady Molly is present at the interview and passes a note to the chief officer telling him they have the wrong woman.

She neatly traps the person responsible for administering the poison in the café, with the help of two of the culprit’s own servants. Her faithful assistant, Mary, observes: ‘…my dear lady had been right from beginning to end.’ Lady Molly explains to Mary how she arrived at the truth, saying: ’Our fellows did not think of that because they are men.’

Lady Molly was the first in a long line of women in fiction who have been able to beat the police at their own job because they have noticed something very simple the male officers did not pick up on.

The Woman in the Big Hat was adapted for the anthology TV series, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in 1971, with Elvi Hale starring as Lady Molly.

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard is now available from or

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