FICTION · INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
Francis Beeding
Also known as: Frances Beeding, Barum Browne
A pseudonym for co-authors Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Leslie Palmer. >They were Oxford graduates who met while at the League of Nations in Geneva. Palmer was a drama critic who wrote books on the theatre under the pseudonym "Christopher Haddon". >Saunders served with the Welsh Guards in WWI and worked for the Air Ministry in WWII, writing the famous pamphlet, The Battle of Britain. From 1946 to 1950 he was librarian of the House of Commons. >They also wrote mainstream fiction under the name David Pilgrim. >Beeding has over thirty novels to his credit, five of which have been adapted into feature films. Of these, The House of Dr. Edwardes remains the best known, as it formed the basis of Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound.
Most acclaimed
Death Walks in Eastrepps
A murder mystery set in Norfolk with half a dozen murders, three arrests, two trials with subsequent hangings (Good Reads). >Death Walks in Eastrepps begins quietly - almost too quietly. Robert Eldridge is returning to Eastrepps on the London train for his customary Wednesday-night tryst with Margaret Withers. At the same time Miss Mary Hewitt is sitting down to dinner with her brother James. Later that night she will make her usual visit to Mrs. Dampier at Tamarisk House. As she leaves to go home, nothing is out of the ordinary. But Mary Hewitt doesn't reach home that night, and her corpse is found the next day in a little wood just off the path she would normally take. A brutal murderer - soon called the Eastrepps Evil - is on the loose. >The Eastrepps Evil is a phrase coined by vacationing newspaperman William Ferris; might he also be the Evil? Or is the murderer Robert Eldridge, who with cold calculation carried on a six-months' affair with Margaret Withers in order to establish the perfect alibi? Or the shiftless Dick Coldfoot, who is blackmailing Eldridge? Or Alistair Rockingham, who has an eye for the ladies and certain compulsions that go beyond merely tipping his hat? Or is it someone else in the formerly sleepy seaside village of Eastrepps?
The Norwich Victims
1935
Mystery fiction. Detective and mystery stories. A middle-aged schoolteacher wins the French lottery and looks around for somewhere safe to invest her prize. Unfortunately for her she decides to consult the unscrupulous John Throgmorton, and he seizes a once in a lifetime opportunity, murdering the unsuspecting Miss Haslett and sending his secretary and partner in crime, Hermione Taylor, to Paris to collect the money. Throgmorton's devious plan is executed to perfection, and it seems that nothing can go wrong. But then he receives an unexpected visitor.
The seven sleepers
1968
Pursuing his misdirected luggage to Geneva, Thomas Preston decides to look up Beatrice Harvel, an acquaintance from the war who is working for the League of Nations. While Thomas is killing time in a café, a stranger thrusts a document in his hand and vanishes. Returning to his hotel, he finds a letter instructing him to deliver the document at a meeting with his "grandmother," and Thomas's decision to keep that appointment thrusts him into the middle of a desperate struggle for the future of Europe.