Mona A. Radford
Personal Information
Description
Mona Augusta Radford (born Mangan) (1894-1990) with her husband Edwin Isaac Radford (1891-1973) made up the writing duo E. & M.A. Radford. Mona Augusta Mangan married Edwin Radford in 1939. Mona was a popular leading lady in musical-comedy and revues until her retirement from the stage. Mona wrote poetry as well as works for the stage. Edwin worked as a journalist, holding many editorial roles on Fleet Street in London, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. The couple turned to crime fiction when they were both in their early fifties. Edwin described their collaborative formula as: “She kills them off, and I find out how she done it.” Their primary series detective was Harry Manson who they introduced in 1944. Between 1944 and 1972 the two wrote thirty novels, all published in England. They also edited the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions and wrote on folk lore and the origins of words and phrases. The Radfords spent their final years living in Worthing on the English South Coast. - from Dean Street Press
Books
Death of a Frightened Editor
> Seven men and a woman were in the first-class coach of a train from London to Brighton. They had travelled together each evening for months. That night one of them, Alexis Mortensen, editor of a scurrilous newspaper, died from strychnine poisoning. Strychnine acts inside fifteen minutes, but Mortensen had had nothing which could have contained the poison for an hour before his death. An unbelievably grotesque story from the past was to be uncovered before the case was solved.
Trunk Call to Murder
Why should a man pay six months' rent in advance for a garage and then never use it? Why should a young woman in a good job walk out of her flat at midnight, take all her clothes with her and then completely vanish? How was it that thousands of pounds vanished from locked safes from three establishments without there being any signs of entry? It took investigations over thousands of miles before Doctor Manson and the Three Musketeers of Homicide found the answers.
From Information Received
>A closely-knit and anonymous gang of women were netting thousands of pounds. So ingenious was their modus operandi that not even Doctor Manson could find anything illegal in their operations - until among their victims were three crooked men, with equal ingenuity in acquiring money. Unfortunately for both sides, murder crept in four times...
A Cosy Little Murder
In this story of greed and carefully planned murder, a dead man had been sitting in a chair for two days. A mysterious woman had cooked him a poisoned meal. A trip by a girl could have been an alibi - yet wasn't...
Murder Isn't Cricket
>>Why should a holidaymaker, sitting to enjoy a game of village cricket, suddenly meet with death in the shape of a flying bullet? >That most English of sporting pastimes: a cricket match between two rivalrous village teams. The game has just ended in a closely fought draw, and the village green is emptied of all spectators, bar one. A dead man is found sitting in a deck chair on the boundary line, clearly shot during the match. The man is a stranger, with no obvious clue to his identity or that of his killer. Nobody has seen or heard the shot fired. The local police are baffled, and call in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Manson, investigative detective par excellence, to solve a seemingly impossible crime. Murder Isn't Cricket was originally pubished in 1946.
Two Ways to Murder
A ghostly apparition, a terrified girl, a superstition, and the mystery surrounding a man who had been buried in a barley field near an old castle are the concomitants in a double murder. Allied to them is a strange story of robbery directed by a boss whose men did not know him and had never seen him. It took weeks of detection by Commander Doctor Manson and the Yard's Homicide Squad to discover the truth.
Death and the Professor
> The Dilettantes Club was a gathering of five savants who dined once a fortnight in Soho, and debated any problem besetting mankind. One evening, into this distinguished company, there intruded a Professor of Logic and Philosophy, an odd little man. The Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard was one of the Dilettantes, and a baffling problem of criminal investigation was debated. The little Professor was able to point the finger at those who currently were eluding the police net. Until...
Death's Inheritance
> Why did Sir John Appleby disinherit his wife and son and leave his estates and large fortune "to my daughter"? The girl had been dead for four years. What was the secret of eight mysterious years missing from his life? Had his wife, or his son, brought about his death to get his money? These were the problems confronting Doctor Manson, Scotland Yard's scientist head, before he solved an intricate plot of murder, revenge and greed.
The Middlefold Murders
Mrs Alicia Wayneright died unexpectedly on the night of a family dinner party - of heart failure, her doctor said. Her sons expected to inherit her fortune, but an unsuspected will, read after the funeral, disclosed that she had disinherited them, leaving the money to a young husband she had secretly married. Then exhumation disclosed that she had been murdered. But who killed her - the sons, in desperate straits for money - or the husband, confidently expecting to succeed to fortune?