Promoting Crime Fiction : Forgotten Author Corner: Some Forgotten Classics by Richard Reynolds

During the interwar years, many famous writers of detective fiction gradually emerged, including Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin, Freeman Wills Crofts, Dorothy L. Sayers and others.
The continued popularity of these wonderful giants of the Golden Age evidences a real nostalgia for stories in which the perpetrator receives their comeuppance. The days of country house parties, the body in the library resulting in the murderer being unmasked by an eccentric amateur and order being restored to a shaken world.

I’ve really enjoyed immersing myself in detective fiction from this period for over fifty years - with shelves of treasured titles as proof! There’s a plethora of titles that have languished in limbo for too long, hence my decision last year to collaborate on another list of GA reissues with publisher, Jon Gifford at the Oleander Press, setting up the Oreon imprint (having advised Andrew Cocks at Ostara Publishing until it’s recent sale to Joffe Books. I’m series consultant to Robert Hyde at Galileo Publishing for his GA list - Clifford Witting, Joan Cockin & Joan Coggin). With the Oreon books, we’ve already dug up twenty from cold storage with more to come - all ones which I’ve long wanted to see available (the original copies stacked up at home!)

Here are a few ‘forgotten’ classics -

Henry Herman (1832-1894), pseudonym of Henry Heydrac D’Arco, was a playwright and a novelist.

In a departure from our existing GA reissues, I believe this a splendid mystery, although not a Christmas tale! The Crime of a Christmas Toy by Henry Herman, takes the reader on an exciting journey through the upstairs and downstairs of Victorian society and certainly contains as much family friction as befits that infamous occasion!

“Sprat growled all the more, sat up, and begged again. The little paws went up and down in a swift quiver, and he made another dart at the box, and sneezed, and shook his little head and sneezed again.

Lord Senfrey patted his old canine friend, and placed him on the armchair by his side.

You must be quiet, Sprat,” he said; “I want to have a look at this. It’s a present, I suppose, from somebody who wishes to disguise his identity,” he added.”

Despite the dog's attempts to warn his master, moments later Lord Senfrey is dead - from a booby-trapped present, on the eve of his wedding day. Talk of the crime becomes the all-engrossing topic of conversation, sending shockwaves throughout Victorian High Society. Was it revenge for the peer’s supposed dalliance with actress Maria Orano, and her recent death by poisoning, or something far more sinister? Private investigator George Grey of Craven Street, Strand, despite his enquiries into a Levantine Count’s machinations and misdoings, is further charged to uncover Senfrey’s murderer. But who could have committed this dastardly outrage?

Robert Alfred John Walling (1869-1949) was a magistrate, journalist and author of twenty-eight detective novels and several short stories. The Fatal Five Minutes (1932), is the first of eleven mysteries featuring Private Enquiry Agent Philip Tolefree.

“They had nothing in common but the universal liability of mankind, the obligation to die. It was Death that tangled them all up in a toil of trouble and for one agonising week ground them all under the heavy heel of a country policeman.”

Clever reasoning and deduction are hallmarks here in The Fatal Five Minutes by R.A.J. Walling, the first of eleven mysteries featuring Private Enquiry Agent Philip Tolefree. When he’s summoned by financier Wellington Burnet to Midwood, his old friend Farrar is surprised by his attendance at the country house party. Minutes after Tolefree’s arrival, and before he learns what he’s to investigate, Burnet is found mysteriously murdered with his skull bashed in. As he’s on the spot, Tolefree, assisted by Farrar, takes charge with preliminary enquiries. Inspector Catterick’s interrogation of guests and household reveals each to have such complete alibis that it is nigh on impossible to establish the villain’s identity! There’s a veritable cornucopia of conundrums for them to fathom. Not least of which was what kind of crookery had Tolefree been supposed to investigate? And who’d had the audacity to kill Burnet in those fatal few minutes?

John Ferguson (1871-1952) was born at Callander, Perthshire and is the author of ten mysteries, including Murder on the Marsh (1930) and The Death of Mr Dodsley (1937), though probably best known for his play, Campbell of Kilmohr.

The Romney Marsh mystery, one of the most diabolically ingenious murders in criminal records, began in fact, like a little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand rising out of the sea, formless as a breath, unsubstantial as a dream.”

Many will have read the British Library detective mystery, The Death of Mr. Dodsley, reissued just before Christmas, 2022, a bibliomystery, concerning the murder of a second-hand London bookseller on Charing Cross Road - and what a great mystery I thought! The author, John Ferguson was a Scottish clergyman, and author of ten stories - we’ve reissued these next two. Murder on the Marsh (1930), where a letter of great interest has been delivered to The Daily Record from Miss Ann Cardew for The Lamplighter, the ‘nom de plume’ of crime reporter and amateur detective, Francis McNab, outlining her concern about her father’s recent erratic and bizarre behaviour.

With a reputation for notable investigative scoops, McNab invites his younger fellow journalist and narrator of this story, Godfrey Chance, to meet Miss Cardew, yet afterwards dismisses her worries as the result of an overactive imagination. However, before McNab has had a chance to meet her father, Mr Cardew is found dead on his front lawn with no sign of foul play. McNab, suspecting something of a sinister nature, encourages Chance to visit New Romney to discover why an inquest has been called. Had Mr Cardew been afraid of something or someone that appeared in the garden at night? And why had he been more fearful on Wednesdays - and often on Tuesday nights too?

The Murderer - Gone. The Victim - Departed. The Witness - Missing... A pea-souper's not the only fog facing London's detectives!

As some may have discovered in Christina Koning’s wonderful evocation of the 1920s & 1930s in her Blind Detective series of books re-published recently by Allison & Busby, a veritable treat is also to be enjoyed in our second offering from John Ferguson. In The Man in the Dark a prominent Londoner is dead, coldly stabbed in front of his warm, crackling fire. There are clues though, and, most importantly, evidence of a witness. But, if innocent, why on earth won't they come forward? As the days pass, the police, along with private detective Francis McNab and journalist Godfrey Chance, are all left with little to go on.

Sandy Kinloch, blind and embittered from the war, visits an old friend on that dreadful evening. A petty disagreement propels him into the grimmest danger as an unwitting witness to the murder. Although already ‘in the dark’, he is knocked out, kidnapped, bundled off in a car and held captive in the heart of the sleepy English countryside.

Things look bleak for Kinloch as McNab and Chance race to sort out the whys and wherefores of this deadly puzzle. Alone and desperate, fingered for a crime of which he's innocent, in love with someone he can't have, and in mortal danger… Can the dreadful fate awaiting Kinloch be averted?

As you’ll see from the titles shown, I’ve cast the net wide and hooked out these lost and forgotten treasures, all offering that wonderful sense of fair play, including those with policemen (some befuddled) and amateur detectives investigating side by side.

We look forward to adding many more to those listed with several more treats before the Summer. Whatever kind of crime you’d like to crack I trust you’ll find the perfect solution here. If your powers of detection are challenged, please ask for my help.

Richard Reynolds has recently retired as the crime fiction specialist at Heffers, Cambridge, after nearly forty-one years. He is the Chair of the CWA Gold Dagger. He remains involved supporting publishers, crime writers and their work. He is Series Consultant for Galileo Publishers GA list. He has collaborated with Jon Gifford at the Oleander Press, setting up a website (Cambridge Crime: Specialists in Murder) supplying recommendations, a blog (theoldmaninthecorner) and an imprint (Oreon), reissuing Golden Age Detective fiction. Richard says ‘Among the generous leaving gifts, a first edition of Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner - an unnamed armchair detective sits in the corner of teahouse ‘solving those crimes baffling to the police. I, too, like sitting in corners and have been doing so for many years!