Book description
‘I suppose I adore you. And I suppose I hate you - impersonally, of
course, A. L.’
News of the murder broke when Hugh Stanton reached for the phone. Aston
Lothbury was lying dead in a flat occupied by his glamorous secretary.
Detective-Inspector Curwen, hurrying to the scene, was misdirected to
the flat above and found a second corpse - that of a wealthy ex-Gaiety
show-girl. Two flats, two murders, but - one killer? There was no lack
of suspects but investigation showed that those who might have killed
one, almost certainly could not have killed the other. Patiently Curwen
prepared to follow a dozen possible lines, but Stanton crossed the lines
and caught the killer in the tangle. 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.
