A Case In Camera

by Oliver Onions

George Oliver Onions (13 November 1873 - 9 April 1961) was an English novelist who published over forty novels and story collections. Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator, before starting his career in writing. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself. He wrote detective fiction, social comedy and historical fiction, as well as several collections of ghost stories.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

George Oliver Onions (1873–1961), who published under the name Oliver Onions, was an English writer of short stories and novels.

Oliver Onions was born in Bradford in 1873. Although he legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, he always published under the name Oliver Onions. Onions originally worked as a commercial artist before turning to writing, and the dust jackets of his earliest works included illustrations painted by Onions himself.

Onions was a prolific writer of short stories and novels and is best remembered today for his ghost stories, the most famous of which is probably ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, originally published in Widdershins (1911). Despite being known today chiefly for his supernatural short fiction, Onions also published more than a dozen novels in a variety of genres, including In Accordance with the Evidence (1912), The Tower of Oblivion (1921), The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939), The Story of Ragged Robyn (1945), and Poor Man's Tapestry (1946), which won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best work of fiction published that year.

Onions was apparently a very private individual, and though admired and well-respected in his time, he appears not to have moved in literary circles, and few personal memoirs of him survive. He spent most of his later life in Wales, where he lived with his wife, Berta Ruck (1878-1978), herself a prolific and popular novelist; they had two sons, Arthur (b. 1912) and William (b. 1913). Oliver Onions died in 1961.

Reviews

[Marcia Letaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a post WWI era, a plane crashes into a home and alters the destinies of the home's occupants forever. A Case in Camera was published by Oliver Onions in 1920. It is an engaging murder mystery set against a world forced to grapple with the emergence of a new technology: the airplane. What we take for granted now, jets flying overhead for example, is a brand new concept, thus the book is an experience in living history better than a historical novel in that Onions was merely reporting attitudes and events that were a part of his reality. I always enjoy reading Onions because of his deft interlacing of his time period with the murder mystery genre.