Book description
Here in one volume are ten of the best of Roy Vickers celebrated
Department of Dead Ends
detective stories. These are detective stories with a difference; the
‘inverted’ type of detective story. Knowing from the start who the
murderer is, the reader is presented with the motive, the workings of
the criminal’s mind, the crime itself, and all the clues.
The ‘surprise’ in Mr Vickers’s stories is, of course, supplied by the
way in which his murderers are detected; and this is where the
Department of Dead Ends comes in - that repository of files which were
never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led
nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a
connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in
his Scotland Yard museum, a rubber trumpet, maybe, or a bunch of red
carnations. Then events move inexorably to their appointed end.
‘One of the half-dozen successful books of detective short stories
published since the days of Sherlock Holmes.’ Manchester Evening News
Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short
stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton Kyle and David Durham.
He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse School, Brasenose
College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple. He left
the University before graduating in order to join the staff of a popular
weekly. After two years of journalistic choring, which included a period
of crime reporting, he became editor of the Novel
Magazine
, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas
as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of
the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short
stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of
the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own
temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but
unsentimental.
Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which
were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine
from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978,
earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished
writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for
the Crime Writers’ Association.
