Part of Series
Dr. Eustace Hailey, that urbane investigator of apparently lost causes, is presented with a most unusual case at the outset of this story. Daphne Homewell insists that she has murdered her uncle and wishes the doctor to prove her case to the police so that her sister and prospective brother-in-law will not be arrested. But Dr. Hailey knows better and only consents to investigate provided the girl gives up her foolish ideas. The murder of Homewell, the shipping magnate was indeed an extraordinary one. In full view of a number of spectators he was apparently stabbed to death while driving off the first tee at his golf course. Important photographs taken during the course of Homewell's swing show that this was impossible. How, therefore, was Homewell stabbed? The patience of Dr. Hailey and Colonel Wickham of Scotland Yard is sorely tried. The solution is, however, brilliantly worked out in the doctor’s own inimitable fashion to the accompaniment of a prodigious quantity of snuff.
Author
Anthony Wynne is a pseudonym of Robert McNair Wilson, an English physician, who developed a specialism in cardiology after working as an assistant to Sir James Mackenzie, whose biography he subsequently wrote in 1926. He was born in Glasgow, the son of William and Helen Wilson, (née Turner), He was educated at Glasgow Academy and Glasgow University and became House Surgeon at Glasgow Western Infirmary. He was Medical Correspondent of 'The Times' from 1914–1942. He twice stood, unsuccessfully, for Parliament, as liberal candidate for the Saffron Walden district of Essex in 1922 and 1923. He wrote biographies and historical works under his own name and a single novel under the pseudonym Harry Colindale. Under Anthony Wynne, he created Eustace Hailey, a doctor in mental diseases and amateur sleuth, who featured in many of his 45 mystery novels, beginning with 'The Mystery of the Evil Eye' (1925) and ending with 'Death of a Shadow' (1950). As Anthony Wynne he also wrote short stories for a variety of magazines and newspapers. He married Winifred Paynter on 7th December 1905 in Alnwick, Northumberland, and the couple had three sons. In the September quarter of 1928 he married again, Doris May Fischel, at Hampstead and they had two sons. He died in the New Forest, Hampshire, on 29 November 1963.
