Vantage Striker: A Golden Age Mystery

by Helen Simpson

‘Excellent’ New York Times‘Wilfully clever… highly sensational’ The ObserverSelected by Martin Edward as one of his 100 Classic Crime novels in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 BooksThis 2025 Spitfire Publishers ebook and paperback edition represent the first republication of this classic of the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ in almost a century
Tennis star, Dermot Boyne, is preparing himself for a meeting with his prospective father-in-law, Lord Cumnor. Tonight he is going to ask permission to marry his daughter. At the last minute, Dermot is ordered by his masters at the Foreign Office to High Bliss, the country residence of the Prime Minister, Albert Aspinall. A vital message has to be delivered in person. When Dermot arrives late that night a private dinner party is winding down. Hours after the dinner party has concluded Aspinall is found battered to death. Inspector Spens of Scotland Yard suspects Dermot as his alibi is weak and it is discovered he suffers from a war injury which has left him susceptible to bouts of violent rage. Did he do it?

About the Author

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 performing on the stage together. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1932. She began writing ‘Golden Age’ detective novels with Clemence Dane, the first, Enter Sir John, earned them founder membership of the exclusive Detection Club and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder!Clemence drifted away from the genre while Helen 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 Author

‘Helen Simpson has reached the stage when any new novel from her pen may be said to be a red-letter day’ Frances Iles in The Daily Telegraph

‘Brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual’ Gladys Mitchell

‘An excellent detective novel… the characters are real human beings’ New York Times

‘Helen Simpson is a writer who combines a finely direct literary style with great erudition’ A.G. Macdonell

‘Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson have scored another hit’ New York Times

215 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Helen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1959 in Bristol, in the West of England, and went to a girls' school. She worked at Vogue for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award while her book Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. (In particular, the mystery author Helen de Guerry Simpson is a different author.)

In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta's top 20 novelists under the age of 40.

In 2009, she donated the short story The Tipping Point to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.