Book description
‘It would be grand to help you find poor old Velfrage. Pretty obvious
that something has happened to him. I mean - well, he may have been
murdered, mayn’t he?’
A solicitor charged with the care of the famously cursed Rabethorpe
diamond has disappeared, along with the man charged with its care. The
prime suspect, Bruce Habershon, wakes up in hospital after suffering
quinine-induced delusions and tells a tale full of dwarves,
chamber-maids and bodies wrapped in carpets. As he tries to work out the
facts from his hazy recollections he is helped and hindered in equal
measure by two beautiful, but very different women who seem to be just
as involved in the mystery as he is. It is up to Inspector Kyle of
Scotland Yard to work out who is telling the truth, and who is plotting
to get away with a very clever murder. 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.
