Barry Perowne is a pseudonym of Philip Atkey who was born in the New Forest area of Wiltshire. He left school at the age of 14 to work for a carnival equipment manufacturer; he used his experiences in this line of work in his later works on carnival showmen who, with their families and caravans, took up winter quarters in the factory yards. He later became secretary to his uncle Bertram Atkey before editing two magazines that published humorous and romantic fiction. In addition he wrote short stories for several other magazines as well as a couple of novels about Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and Red Jim, the first air detective. By agreement with the E W Hornung estate he continued the Raffles series created by that author. His first stories of the amateur cracksman appeared in the British magazine 'The Thriller' with the sophisticated cracksman's adventures put into contemporary settings. In 1933 he married Bertram Atkey's daughter; their marriage was to produce one daughter and ended in divorce in 1948. He joined the Army in 1940 and served three years in the infantry and three years in the intelligence corps. He continued to write his Raffles stories and many of them appeared in 'Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'. Fourteen of the best of those stories appeared in 'Raffles Revisited' in 1974, a book which came some 40 years after his first published books about Raffles. His Raffles stories were considered by many critics to be far superior to those of Raffles' creator E W Hornung. He also wrote under his own name, Philip Atkey, and 'Blue Water Murder' (1935), 'Heirs of Merlin' (1945) and 'Juniper Rock' (1952) were the results. He also used the pseudonym Pat Merriman, 'Night Call' (1937) and in addition wrote under his own name, 'Arrest These Men!' (1932) being the first of such productions ... to be followed by many more, ending with 'A Singular Conspiracy', which is a crime fantasy based on an apocryphal meeting between Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. He died on 24 December 1985.

Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Malleson an English crime writer. She also wrote non-genre fiction as Anne Meredith , under which name she also published one crime novel. She also wrote an autobiography under the Meredith name, Three-a-Penny (1940). Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher but she was determined to become a writer. Her first mystery novel followed a visit to the theatre when she saw The Cat and the Canary then, Tragedy at Freyne, featuring Scott Egerton who later appeared in 10 novels, was published in 1927. She adopted the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert to publish detective novels which achieved great success and made her a name in British detective literature, although many of her readers had always believed that they were reading a male author. She went on to publish 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas. Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the aristocratic detectives who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him, such as Lord Peter Wimsey. Instead of dispassionately analyzing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethicality to clear him or her. The first Crook novel, Murder by Experts, was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel, A Nice Little Killing, was published in 1974. Her thriller The Woman in Red (1941) was broadcast in the United States by CBS and made into a film in 1945 under the title My Name is Julia Ross. She never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.

Cyril Hare was the pseudonymn of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark who was the third son of Henry Herbert Gordon Clark of Mickleham Hall, a merchant in the wine and spirit trade in the family firm of Matthew Clark & Sons. Having spent most of his formative years in the country where he learned to hunt, shoot and fish, he was educated at St Aubyn's, Rottingdean and Rugby, where he won a prize for writing English verse, before reading history at New College, Oxford, where he gained a first class degree. His family tradition indicated a legal career and he was duly called to the bar in 1924 and he joined the firm of famed lawyer Ronald Oliver and went on to practice in the civil and criminal courts in and around London. He was 36 when he began his writing career and he picked his pseudonymn from Hare Court, where he worked, and Cyril Mansions, Battersea, where he lived after he had married Mary Barbara Lawrence in 1933. The couple had one son and two daughters. His first literary endeavours were short, flippant sketches for Punch magazine and he had articles published in the Illustrated London News and The Law Journal. His first detective novel, 'Tenant for Death' was published in 1937 and it was called 'an engaging debut'. During the early years of World War II he toured as a judge's marshall and he used his experiences as the basis for his fourth novel 'Tragedy at Law', which was published in 1942. In that same year he became a civil servant with the Director of Public Prosecutions and in the latter stages of the war he worked in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where his experiences proved invaluable when writing 'With a Bare Bodkin' in 1946. He was appointed county court judge for Surrey in 1950 and he spent his time between travelling the circuit trying civil cases and writing his detective fiction. In addition to these two strings to his bow, he was a noted public speaker and was often in demand by a wide variety of societies. But his workload did curtail his literary output, which was also hampered by the fact that he did not use a typewriter, and his reputation, very good as it is in the field of detective fiction, stands on nine novels and a host of short stories. He also wrote a children's book, 'The Magic Bottle' in 1946 and a play, 'The House of Warbeck' in 1955. He has left two enduting characters in Inspector Mallett of Scotland Yard, who featured in three novels, and Francis Pettigrew, an amateur sleuth, who also featured in three novels. In addition the two appeared together in two other novels, 'Tragedy at Law' (1942) and 'He Should Have Died Hereafter' (1958). Having suffered from tuberculosis for some time, he died at his home near Boxhill, Surrey on 25 August 1958, aged only 57. After his death Michael Gilbert introduced a fine collection of his short stories entitled 'The Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare', in which he paid due tribute to a fellow lawyer and mystery writer. Gerry Wolstenholme June 2011

Victor Canning was a prolific writer of novels and thrillers who flourished in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, but whose reputation has faded since his death in 1986. He was personally reticent, writing no memoirs and giving relatively few newspaper interviews. Canning was born in Plymouth, Devon, the eldest child of a coach builder, Fred Canning, and his wife May, née Goold. During World War I his father served as an ambulance driver in France and Flanders, while he with his two sisters went to live in the village of Calstock ten miles north of Plymouth, where his uncle Cecil Goold worked for the railways and later became station master. After the war the family returned to Plymouth. In the mid 1920s they moved to Oxford where his father had found work, and Victor attended the Oxford Central School. Here he was encouraged to stay on at school and go to university by a classical scholar, Dr. Henderson, but the family could not afford it and instead Victor went to work as a clerk in the education office at age 16. Within three years he had started selling short stories to boys’ magazines and in 1934, his first novel. Mr. Finchley Discovers his England, was accepted by Hodder and Stoughton and became a runaway best seller. He gave up his job and started writing full time, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names. Lord Rothermere engaged him to write for the Daily Mail, and a number of his travel articles for the Daily Mail were collected as a book with illustrations by Leslie Stead under the title Everyman's England in 1936. He also continued to write short stories. He married Phyllis McEwen in 1935, a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare. They had three daughters, Lindel born in 1939, Hilary born in 1940, and Virginia who was born in 1942, but died in infancy. In 1940 he enlisted in the Army, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. Canning worked in anti-aircraft batteries in the south of England until early 1943, when he was sent to North Africa and took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns. At the end of the war he was assigned to an Anglo-American unit doing experimental work with radar range-finding. It was top secret work but nothing to do with espionage, though Canning never discouraged the assumption of publishers and reviewers that his espionage stories were partly based on experience. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of major. He resumed writing with The Chasm (1947), a novel about identifying a Nazi collaborator who has hidden himself in a remote Italian village. A film of this was planned but never finished. Canning’s next book, Panther’s Moon, was filmed as Spy Hunt, and from now on Canning was established as someone who could write a book a year in the suspense genre, have them reliably appear in book club and paperback editions on both sides of the Atlantic, be translated into the main European languages, and in many cases get filmed. He himself spent a year in Hollywood working on scripts for movies of his own books and on TV shows. The money earned from the film of The Golden Salamander (filmed with Trevor Howard) meant that Canning could buy a substantial country house with some land in Kent, Marle Place, where he lived for nearly twenty years and where his daughter continues to live now. From the mid 1950s onwards his books became more conventional, full of exotic settings, stirring action sequences and stock characters. In 1965 he began a series of four books featuring a private detective called Rex Carver, and these were among his most successful in sales terms. He died in 1986.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly. Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.

Julian Gustave Symons is primarily remembered as a master of the art of crime writing. However, in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and he held a distinguished reputation in each field. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day. It is for this that he was awarded various prizes, and, in 1982, named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America - an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain's Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writer. Symons held a number of positions prior to becoming a full-time writer including secretary to an engineering company and advertising copywriter and executive. It was after the end of World War II that he became a free-lance writer and book reviewer and from 1946 to 1956 he wrote a weekly column entitled "Life, People - and Books" for the Manchester Evening News. During the 1950s he was also a regular contributor to Tribune, a left-wing weekly, serving as its literary editor. He founded and edited 'Twentieth Century Verse', an important little magazine that flourished from 1937 to 1939 and he introduced many young English poets to the public. He has also published two volumes of his own poetry entitled 'Confusions about X', 1939, and 'The Second Man', 1944. He wrote hie first detective novel, 'The Immaterial Murder Case', long before it was first published in 1945 and this was followed in 1947 by a rare volume entitled 'A Man Called Jones' that features for the first time Inspector Bland, who also appeared in Bland Beginning. These novles were followed by a whole host of detective novels and he has also written many short stories that were regularly published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In additin there are two British paperback collections of his short stories, Murder! Murder! and Francis Quarles Investigates, which were published in 1961 and 1965 resepctively.

Dame Ngaio Marsh, born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900, but she was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter. Marsh's first novel, A MAN LAY DEAD (1934), which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introduced the detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn: a combination of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and a realistically depicted police official at work. Throughout the 1930s Marsh painted occasionally, wrote plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand, and published detective novels. In 1937 Marsh went to England for a period. Before going back to her home country, she spent six months travelling about Europe. All her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre and painting. A number are set around theatrical productions (Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death, Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens), and two others are about actors off stage (Final Curtain and False Scent). Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case" referred to in Opening Night. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation (Artists in Crime), and who features in several later novels. Series: * Roderick Alleyn

Aka Robertson Halket. E.R. Punshon (Ernest Robertson Punshon) (1872-1956) was an English novelist and literary critic of the early 20th century. He also wrote under the pseudonym Robertson Halket. Primarily writing on crime and deduction, he enjoyed some literary success in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, he is remembered, in the main, as the creator of Police Constable Bobby Owen, the protagonist of many of Punshon's novels. He reviewed many of Agatha Christie's novels for The Guardian on their first publication.

Aka Maxwell March. Margery Louise Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family of writers. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, was editor of The Christian Globe and The New London Journal, while her mother wrote stories for women's magazines as Emmie Allingham. Margery's aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine. Margery earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine. Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex. She returned to London in 1920 to attend the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), and met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. They married in 1928. He was her collaborator and designed the cover jackets for many of her books. Margery's breakthrough came 1929 with the publication of her second novel, The Crime at Black Dudley . The novel introduced Albert Campion, although only as a minor character. After pressure from her American publishers, Margery brought Campion back for Mystery Mile and continued to use Campion as a character throughout her career. After a battle with breast cancer, Margery died in 1966. Her husband finished her last novel, A Cargo of Eagles at her request, and published it in 1968.

Born Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen was born in Dudley near Wolverhampton, England but he grew up in Cookham, Berkshire where his father owned a public house and he was educated at Taplow School, which was run by nuns. The artist Stanley Spencer lived next door to Ernest and his friends included writers and actors such as Ivor Novello and Jack Buchanan and it was the latter who steered young Ernest toward acting (in later life Ernest was to write a stage show for him.) At 17 Ernest ran away to become an actor, joining a company performing Shakespeare in various Irish towns. Ernest was later to say he only went into the theatre to meet girls and in 1930 he married Jane Grahame, who for several years played one of the Lost Boys in 'Peter Pan'. Jane's connections propelled Ernest to the West End, where his good looks secured him juvenile roles: he shared stages with Charles Laughton, Madeleine Carroll and Fay Compton. And Jane and Ernest took the leads in the first British touring production of Noel Coward's 'Private Lives' by which time their only child, a daughter named Susan, had been born. Considering himself only a mediocre actor he moved into journalism and as "Charles Ton", a 'Daily Mail' showbusiness gossip columnist, he frequented the Embassy and the Café de Paris, where he got to know many Soho people and even met Fred Astaire when he was starring in 'The Gay Divorcee' at the Palace Theatre. He later covered boxing for 'The People' and then his first novel 'Mr Walker Wants to Know' (1939) came along; it was a spin-off from a radio series he scripted. He also wrote scripts for Twentieth Century Fox and British International Pictures, but by the outbreak of war he and Jane were working fulltime on live weekly shows for BBC Light Entertainment.. He was not considered fit enough for active service so he continued to work for the BBC before, in 1942 his famous creation, the sinister and sarcastic Dr Morelle, debuted on the magazine-cum-anthology show Monday Night at Eight. His first Dr Morelle novel, 'Meet Dr Morelle' followed in 1943', the first of 15 novels starring the doctor, who it was said was based on film actor and director Erich von Stroheim, whom Ernest had met briefly in Paris in the 1930s. With his secretary Miss Frayle - a part written specially for Jane - Dr Morelle featured in novels, short stories, a film - 'The Case of the Missing Heiress' (1949), a play and three radio serials. In 1942 Ernest also got his own hugely popular 'Armchair Detective' series, and in 1952 came a film of the Armchair Detective, featuring Ernest. Ernest crossed easily to television and in the late 1950s came Judge for Yourself - trials where the audience was the jury. Historical and detective novels were followed by works such as 'Confessions of a Special Agent' (1957), featuring the exploits of Jack Evans; 'The Gilded Lillie' (1958), a biography of Lillie Langtry; and 'Monsters of the Purple Twilight', (1960) a history of the Zeppelin. Then he started on true stories of various animals. Amazingly, in his late 60s Ernest took up marathon running, which, he claimed, helped with his depression. He ran four in London, two in New York and his book 'Run for Your Life' (1985) described these experiences and his training methods. It is said that he was still jogging in Regents Park as late as 2005! He was a lifetime member of Equity, and he was a founder member of the Crime Writers Association in the 1950s. In his mid-90s his career was revitalised by a new agent, and American and Canadian publishers were reprinting his work of the 1950s and 60s. He was also working on a new book - 'Dr Morelle and the LapDancer' - which subsequently did not materialise. Apparently he was a shy man and he was happy alone (his wife Jane died in 1981) in his tiny, book-littered Marylebone flat. He had not a single comfortable armchair but had two desks, 70 years' worth of diaries and lots of pictures (several his own work), many