Book description
‘Lyle Canvey, metallurgy, Arthur Stranack, mechanics, Rupert Eddis,
chemistry, detested one another. This deep dislike was temperamental,
admitted by each to be unjustified. They had not even the excuse of
jealousy-each was proud of the others’ achievements.’
Three scientists who share a lock-keeper’s house are all suspects in a
murder. They work and live together yet they detest one another, but all
detest their employer.
It proves difficult to ascertain who is telling the truth and who is
not. The police hear the same story from each man, but surely only one
must be guilty of the murder, one must be aiding and abetting, and one
must be innocent. 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.
