Enter Sir John

By Helen Dane, Clemence (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton) & Simpson, Helen Simpson, Clemence Dane

Book Overview

'An excellent detective novel... the characters are real human beings' New York Times 'So full of high spirits and sprightly wit' The Times This 2024 Spitfire Publishers ebook and paperback edition represent the first republication of this classic of the 'Golden Age of Crime' in almost a century Magda Druce lay stiffly across the sofa end. Her legs, in their pink silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, stuck out like doll's legs from her short skirt; her dangling head had fallen back revealing the cause of her death; her short fuzz of hair was dark with half-dried blood, and her cheek and brow so broken and disfigured that the pretty outline of the rest of the face enhanced the horror of such ruin. The crime scene is the Theatre Royal in Peridu, a provincial mining town in Wales. The murderer, it seems from all the evidence, is fellow actress Martella Baring. But amateur sleuth Sir John Saumarez thinks otherwise. The London actor-manager, famous for his portrayal of society rôles created to fit his personality, sees clues overlooked and the case bungled by Scotland Yard. Sir John, elegant, imperturbable, aloof, investigates the apparently open-and-shut case. About the Authors Clemence Dane, the pen-name of Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), began her career as an actress, taught schoolgirls, sculpted professionally and wrote some of the most successful novels of the inter-war years. Her debut novel Regiment of Women , a thinly-veiled treatment of lesbian relationships, was an immediate bestseller on publication in 1917. She was also a highly successful screenwriter co-writing with Alexander Korda, Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo. She won an Oscar for Best Story in 1946 for Vacation from Marriage starred Deborah Kerr. Helen Simpson, born Helen de Guerry Simpson in 1897 in Sydney, Australia, read French at Oxford before being sent down for breaking the ban on male and female students acting together. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1932. The two authors wrote three 'Golden Age' detective novels together, the first, Enter Sir John , earned them founder membership of the exclusive Detection Club and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder! Dane drifted away from the genre while Christine became great friends with Dorothy L. Sayers and Gladys Mitchell and would write detective fiction on her own and in collaboration with other Detection Club members, contributing to The Floating Admiral , Ask a Policeman and The Anatomy of Murder . Helen died of cancer aged just 43 in 1940. Praise for the Authors Printer's Devil 'A most baffling mystery... on the vagaries of those who write books and those who bring them into being' New York Times 'Just the kind of murder story that is my ideal' Yorkshire Post Re-Enter Sir John 'Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson have scored another hit' New York Times Vantage Striker 'Excellent' New York Times Selected for inclusion in The Story of Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards 'Intriguing and ahead of its time' Martin Edwards 'A witty story of politics, murder, English life and character' Barzun & Taylor

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0D49VZX2W
• ISBN13: 9798325636097
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 223 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"