Here in one volume are ten of the best of Roy Vickers celebrated Department of Dead Ends detective stories. These are detective stories with a difference; the ‘inverted’ type of detective story. Knowing from the start who the murderer is, the reader is presented with the motive, the workings of the criminal’s mind, the crime itself, and all the clues. The ‘surprise’ in Mr Vickers’s stories is, of course, supplied by the way in which his murderers are detected; and this is where the Department of Dead Ends comes in – that repository of files which were never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in his Scotland Yard museum, a rubber trumpet, maybe, or a bunch of red carnations. Then events move inexorably to their appointed end. ‘One of the half-dozen successful books of detective short stories published since the days of Sherlock Holmes.’ Manchester Evening News
Author
William Edward Vickers (1889 - 1965) was an English mystery writer better known under his pen name Roy Vickers, but he also wrote under the pseudonyms Roy C. Vickers, David Durham, Sefton Kyle, and John Spencer. He is now remembered mostly for his attribution to Scotland Yard of a Department of Dead Ends, specialising in solving old, sometimes long-forgotten cases, mostly by chance encounters of odd bits of strange and apparently disconnected evidence. He was educated at Charterhouse School, and left Brasenose College, Oxford, without a degree. For some time he studied law at the Middle Temple, but never practised. He married Mary Van Rossem and they had one son. He worked as a journalist, court reporter, magazine editor and wrote a large number of non-fiction articles which he sold in the hundreds to newspapers and magazines. Between November 1913 and February 1917, 20 short stories by Vickers were published in the 'Novel Magazine', which he edited. And in 1914 he published his first book, a biography of Field Marshal Frederick, Earl Roberts entitled 'Lord Roberts The Story of His Life'. In September 1934, 'The Rubber Trumpet', the first of 37 stories featuring the fictitious Department of Dead Ends, appeared in Pearson's Magazine. This was subsequently collected with other stories in 'The Department of Dead Ends' (1949). Another series of his books featured his heroine Felicity Dove. In 1960 he edited the Crime Writers' Association's anthology of short stories 'Some Like Them Dead'. The Manchester Evening News called one of his collections, 'one of the half-dozen successful books of detective short stories published since the days of Sherlock Holmes'. Some of his work has been adapted for film such as 'Girl in the News' (1940), 'Violent Moment' (1959) and there were three of his stories used as episodes in television's 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' series (Season 3: 1957-58). He died in Hampstead in 1965. Note: He was born in the first quarter of 1889 and he died in the third quarter of 1965 so the dates of death above reflect that no definite date is known for either event.
