Book description
A collection of 9 thrilling detective stories,
Murder Will Out
follows Inspector George Rason of Scotland Yard’s Department of Dead
Ends - an office devoted entirely to unsolved cases, finding clues along
trails gone cold, and pursuing crimes on which other investigators have
admitted defeat. Along the way, we are introduced to a diverse gallery
of villains - jealous rivals and conniving spouses make up just a few of
those fiendish culprits whose crimes have so gone unpunished - but might
just catch up with them in the end. Meticulously plotted and darkly
humorous, Roy Vickers’ collection is a brilliantly entertaining journey
through the world of crimes unsolved, from the perspective of both
detective and villain. 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.
