Murdered: One By One

by Francis Beeding

Detective Inspector Martin of Scotland Yard exposes a clever madman who strikes at the members of a literary society in a small English town.

Genres: Mystery

189 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Francis Beeding is the pseudonym used by two British male writers, John Leslie Palmer (1885-1944) and Hilary St George Saunders (1898-1951). The pseudonym was a joint effort and was apparently chosen because Palmer always wanted to be called Francis and Saunders had once owned a house in the Sussex village of Beeding.

The pair met when undergraduates at Oxford and remained friends when they both worked at the League of Nations in Geneva and it was while there that they decided to collaborate on writing detective novels.

Discussing their collaboration at one time Saunders commented, 'Palmer can't be troubled with description and narrative, and I'm no good at creating characters or dialogue.' Whatever the reason it certainly worked.

Palmer was drama critic for The Saturday Evening Review of Literature and also the Evening Standard. As well as his collaboration on detective novels he wrote such as The Comedy of Manners, Moliere and other books on the theatre. He also wrote novels under the pseudonym of Christopher Haddon.

Saunders served with the Welsh Guards in World War I and was awarded the Military Cross. He worked for the Air Ministry in World War II and was the anonymous author of the popular bestseller The Battle of Britain in 1940. It sold over three million copies in England and was translated into 25 languages. He also wrote The Green Beret (1949), an official history of the British commandos. He was librarian at the House of Commons from 1946 to 1950.

Palmer and Saunders' collaboration on detective fiction began with The Seven Sleepers in 1925. It was the first of 17 spy titles concerning Colonel Alastair Granby, DSO, of the Secret branch of the British Intelligence Service. Many of those titles contained a number from one to 13 but they did not run consecutively; for example The Six Proud Walkers was published in 1928 while The One Sane Man was published in 1934. Overall they produced 31 mysteries.

Perhaps their most famous novel was Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931), a title that the Sherlock Holmes scholar Vincent Starrett once described as the best detective novel that he had ever read.

Their novel The House of Dr. Edwardes (1927) was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Spellbound in 1945, starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman.

Gerry Wolstenholme
December 2011

Reviews

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valerie Beauchamp (aka Vera Brown) was the prolific and wealthy author of romances which end, asall love stories should, happily ever after. Unfortunately for Valerie, her story didn't end quite so happily. She receives fan letters from an Arthur Scott-Digby who shyly imagines that they are kindred spirits--souls adrift looking for lasting love. He finally begs her to meet him and she, like many of her fictional heroines, is caught up in the romance of it all and rushes off to do so. Only Arthur Scott-Digby doesn't exist. He has been created in an elaborate hoax concocted by her supposed friends in the local literary society--in an effort to cut the lady (who they think rather full of herself) down to size.

She does appear distraught--denouncing them all and even kicking Lavinia, her cousin, friend and confidante, out of the house because she suspects her of being in on the hoax. After a few days, Lavinia receives a letter that indicates that all may be forgiven, but that Valerie is still distraught enough that she may take her own life. Lavinia comes back to 'Avilion (the house) to find her cousin dead--not by her own hand, but battered to death in her own bed. Mysterious fingerprints are found in the room, the safe has been pilfered, and a ladder used to enter the bedroom window. The fingerprints will be found to belong to no one in the case--including the members of the literary club who quickly fall under suspicion. For you see--Valerie left behind a rather curious will. After making provisions to care for Lavinia and others, she has left a life interest in the remainder of her estate to the very people who humiliated her...in a winner take all, tontine-like fashion. As long as the legatees remain alive and part of the literary society, they each will receive £200 per year. If someone dies or resigns from the society, the remaining members will split the principle sum assigned to the one who is gone. So, maybe someone knew about the will and rushed their inheritance a bit. Then the members of the society begin to die...one by one.

The beginning of the novel seemed hauntingly familiar to me--a romance writer with no real romance in her life who receives supposed love letters from an unknown admirer and it all leads to murder & mayhem. I wish I could remember the book...I enjoyed this one very much. Beeding is very descriptive and manages to build up the suspense surrounding the serial killings very nicely. ★★★ and 3/4

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks!

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The scene : a comfortable suburb of London. The characters : a circle of established and wannabe writers, young and old, male and female. When they play a cruel prank on Valerie Beaumont, an insufferable romantic novelist, bad things start to happen. Valerie goes crazy with paranoia and anger, dismissing even her faithful but unbalanced companion Lavinia. Then Valerie is murdered. And when it is discovered that her will benefited the same group of people who had played that hoax on her, the pranksters find themselves under suspicion. But then the members of the group start being murdered one by one, and so Scotland Yard ends up displacing their suspicions constantly towards the ever-shrinking group of survivors.

I enjoy this genre and read it with pleasure. I was surprised by the ending, and that is always a bonus.