‘Walling’s name is a guarantee of an absorbing mystery’ New York Times - ‘Unusual and rather horrifying’ The Times - ‘An original and uncommonly well-written detective story’ Bookman - Golden Age of Crime writer R.A.J. Walling’s first-ever crime novel, republished here for the first time in almost a century - This 2023 Spitfire Publishers edition includes a complete bibliography of R.A.J. Walling’s crime novels Noel Pinson, barrister and sometime amateur sleuth, savoured his carefully made cup of tea in his digs near the Temple, London’s legal district. Waiting for him in the morning’s post was an important envelope. The letter inside outlined the curious disappearance of English country solicitor, Westmore Colebroke. Colebroke had vanished three-months ago, the morning after he had arranged with his financier a large withdrawal of funds. Aided by retired detective superintendent Joe Grainger, Pinson works to solve this puzzling case traveling from London to Devon, Paris and Morlaix in Brittany. Has Westmore Colebroke met with a violent end? Was it a coincidence that both his office clerk, Toms, and chauffeur, Julep left his employ just before the hapless lawyer disappeared? And why didn’t Colebroke fit the mould of a staid provincial solicitor? ABOUT THE AUTHOR R.A.J. Walling was an English crime novelist and West Country newspaper editor. Robert Alfred John Walling was born in Exeter in 1869, and between 1927 and 1949 he wrote twenty-eight detective novels. He was especially popular in the US, the prestigious New York publishing house, William Morrow & Co, publishing most of his books. Wallings’s novels were also translated into French and Italian by leading European publishers. He is best known for his serial character, Philip Tolefree, a private investigator masquerading as an insurance agent, who starred in twenty-two books. His other serial characters, Noel Pinson, an English barrister and amateur sleuth and retired detective superintendent Joe Grainger featured in Walling’s first published detective novel, The Strong Room (Jarrolds, London 1927). Pinson and Grainger had previously teamed-up in several serial-only detective stories written by Walling, The Fatal Glove and The Fourth Man . Walling died in 1949 at his home in Plymouth, South Devon, aged 80. PRAISE FOR THE R.A.J. WALLING ‘R.A.J. Walling is an extremely skilful maker of plots and surprises’ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Sunday Times ‘Here is an author who can write rings around most of his rivals, who knows the plot, and never misses a clue’ New York Herald Tribune ‘He writes like a man of the world and his work is for the intelligent, discriminating reader’ New York Telegram ‘Thrills and suspense, a pot puri all ready for the appetite of the most exacting reader of detective fiction’ Boston Transcript ‘R.A.J. Walling handles his clues very carefully’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Contemporary detective stories come no finer than this’ New York World ‘A master of the technique of this type of fiction, and his books are peopled with real human beings instead of puppets’ New York Times ‘The man who invented these incomparable stories is a novelist as many-sided, as gifted, and as significant as any man writing today’ Eden Phillpotts