At his cottage outside a town thirty miles west of London, a moneylender with a successful sideline in blackmail is murdered and his property set on fire. Police trawl through his various victims in order to hunt the killer down. Suspicion falls in particular on a detective novelist who was in debt to the dead man and he is arrested. His sister calls in the assistance of Inspector French who she had once met, and he unofficially makes some inquiries. This raises enough doubts for his superiors to agree to his taking on the case. With the novelist on remand on a charge for murder, French with assistance from the man's sister, is able to discover that the real killer's motive sprung from another crime committed many years before in Australia.
Evans, Curtis. Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961. McFarland, 2014.
Herbert, Rosemary. Whodunit?: A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.
