Alan Melville
Alan Melville was an English broadcaster, writer, actor, raconteur, producer, playwright and wit.
There are multiple authors with this name.
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Lettice Cooper
Lettice Ulpha Cooper began to write stories when she was seven. She studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.
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She returned home after Oxford to work for her family's engineering firm and wrote her first novel, 'The Lighted Room' in 1925. She spent a year as associate edtior at 'Time and Tide' and during the Second World War worked for the Ministry of Food's public relations division. Between 1947 and 1957 she was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levy and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of -
John Dickson Carr
AKA Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn.
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John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. It Walks by Night, his first published detective novel, featuring the Frenchman Henri Bencolin, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in Hag's Nook in 1933, Carr's other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale, who debuted in The Plague Court Murders (1934). -
Ethel Lina White
Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based, and Some Must Watch (1933), on which the film The Spiral Staircase (1946) was based.
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Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876, White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books.
She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s.
Her first three works, published between 1927 and 1930, w -
Julian Symons
Julian Gustave Symons is primarily remembered as a master of the art of crime writing. However, in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and he held a distinguished reputation in each field.
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His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day. It is for this that he was awarded various prizes, and, in 1982, named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America - an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain's -
John Ferguson
John Ferguson (1871-1952) was a Scottish clergyman, playwright, and mystery writer.
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John Ferguson was born at Callander, Perthshire, but has made his home in many sharply contrasted places, from the misty isle of Skye to the sunlit island of Guernsey. And though now a resident in the New Forest near Lymington he lived for six years in the grim Dunimarle Castle in Fife, where Macduff's wife and child were murdered by Macbeth. As a dramatist Mr Ferguson is probably best known for his now famous play Campbell of Kilmohr, which at its first Royalty Theatre production was hailed by the dramatic critic of the Glasgow Herald as 'a new and significant type of Scottish drama'. Of John Ferguson's work one critic has said, 'As no two of his stories ar -
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Richard Hull
Richard Henry Sampson FCA (6 September 1896 – 1973), known by the pseudonym Richard Hull, was a British writer who became successful as a crime novelist with his first book in 1934.
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Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...
Note: At least two other authors with the same name: Richard Hull-illustrator & Richard Hull-non-fiction -
Michael Gilbert
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Born in Lincolnshire in 1912, Michael Francis Gilbert was educated in Sussex before entering the University of London where he gained an LLB with honours in 1937. Gilbert was a founding member of the British Crime Writers Association, and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America - an achievement many thought long overdue. He won the Life Achievement Anthony Award at the 1990 Boucheron in London, and in 1980 he was knighted as a Commander in the Order of the British Empire. Gilbert made his debut in 1947 with Close Quarters, and since then has become recognized as one of our most versatile British mystery writers.
He was the fat -
Anthony Berkeley
Anthony Berkeley Cox was an English crime writer. He wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley Cox, and A. Monmouth Platts. One of the founders of The Detection Club
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Cox was born in Watford and was educated at Sherborne School and University College London.
He served in the Army in World War I and thereafter worked as a journalist, contributing a series of humourous sketches to the magazine 'Punch'. These were later published collectively (1925) under the Anthony Berkeley pseudonym as 'Jugged Journalism' and the book was followed by a series of minor comic novels such as 'Brenda Entertains' (1925), 'The Family Witch' (1925) and 'The Professor on Paws' (1926).
It was also in 1925 when he published, anonymously to b -
Freeman Wills Crofts
Born in Dublin of English stock, Freeman Wills Crofts was educated at Methodist and Campbell Colleges in Belfast and at age 17 he became a civil engineering pupil, apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley D Wise who was the chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway (BNCR).
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In 1899 he became a fully fledged railway engineer before becoming a district engineer and then chief assistant engineer for the BNCR.
He married in 1912, Mary Bellas Canning, a bank manager's daughter. His writing career began when he was recovering from a serious illness and his efforts were rewarded when his first novel 'The Cask' was accepted for publication by a London publishing house. Within two decades the book had sold 100,000 copies. Thereafter he con -
George Bellairs
AKA Hilary Landon
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George Bellairs is the nom de plume of Harold Blundell, a crime writer and bank manager born in Heywood, near Rochdale, Lancashire, who settled in the Isle of Man on retirement. He wrote more than 50 books, most featuring the series' detective Inspector Littlejohn. He also wrote four novels under the alternative pseudonym Hilary Landon. -
Lettice Cooper
Lettice Ulpha Cooper began to write stories when she was seven. She studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.
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She returned home after Oxford to work for her family's engineering firm and wrote her first novel, 'The Lighted Room' in 1925. She spent a year as associate edtior at 'Time and Tide' and during the Second World War worked for the Ministry of Food's public relations division. Between 1947 and 1957 she was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levy and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of -
E.C.R. Lorac
Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
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She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. -
J. Jefferson Farjeon
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon was always going to be a writer as, born in London, he was the son of Benjamin Leopold Farjeon who at the time was a well-known novelist whose other children were Eleanor Farjeon, who became a children's writer, and Herbert Farjeon, who became a playwright and who wrote the well-respected 'A Cricket Bag'.
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The family were descended from Thomas Jefferson but it was his maternal grandfather, the American actor Joseph Jefferson, after whom Joseph was named. He was educated privately and at Peterborough Lodge and one of his early jobs, from 1910 to 1920, was doing some editorial work for the Amalgamated Press.
His first published work was in 1924 when Brentano's produced 'The Master Criminal', which is a tale of identity -
Ellen Wilkinson
Ellen Cicely Wilkinson PC (8 October 1891 – 6 February 1947) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death. As the Member of Parliament (MP) for Jarrow, she became a national figure when, in 1936, she figured prominently in the Jarrow March of the town's unemployed to London, to petition for the right to work. Although unsuccessful at the time, the march provided an iconic image for the 1930s, and helped to form post-Second World War attitudes to unemployment and social justice.
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Wilkinson was born into a poor though ambitious Manchester family, and embraced socialism at an early age. After graduating from the University of Manchester she worked for a women's suffrage organisation and -
Carol Carnac
Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
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She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. -
Christopher St. John Sprigg
Christopher St. John Sprigg aka Christopher Caudwell was a British Marxist writer, thinker and poet.
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He was born into a Roman Catholic family, resident at 53 Montserrat Road, Putney. He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at the age of 15 after his father, Stanhope Sprigg, lost his job as literary editor of the Daily Express. Caudwell moved with his father to Bradford and began work as a reporter for the Yorkshire Observer. He made his way to Marxism and set about rethinking everything in light of it, from poetry to philosophy to physics, later joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in Poplar, London.
In December 1936 he drove an ambulance to Spain and joined the International Brigades there, training a -
Mavis Doriel Hay
Mavis Doriel Hay (1894-1979), who in early life lived in north London, was a novelist, who fleetingly lit up the golden age of British crime fiction. She attended St Hilda's, Oxford, around about the same time as Dorothy L Sayers was at Somerville.
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She published only three detective novels, 'Murder Underground' (1934), 'Death on the Cherwell' (1935) and 'The Santa Klaus Murder' (1936). All three titles were well received on publication.
She was also an expert on rural handicraft and wrote several books on the subject including 'Rural Industries of England and Wales' with co-author Helen Elizabeth Fitzrandolph.
In 1929, she married her co-author's brother Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, a member of a wealthy and influential family of loyalist -
John Bude
John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.
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He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.
This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that -
Anne Meredith
Librarian's note: there is more than one author with this name.
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Anne Meredith was a pseudonym of Lucy Malleson (1899-1973) who is best known as the author of the Arthur Crook series of detective novels published under the name of Anthony Gilbert . She was a highly esteemed writer of crime fiction and a member of the elite Detection Club, but the 'Anne Meredith' books were out of print for many years. -
Raymond W. Postgate
Raymond William Postgate (6 November 1896 – 29 March 1971) was an English socialist, writer, journalist and editor, social historian, mystery novelist, and gourmet who founded the Good Food Guide.
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John Bude
John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.
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He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.
This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that -
Anne Meredith
Librarian's note: there is more than one author with this name.
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Anne Meredith was a pseudonym of Lucy Malleson (1899-1973) who is best known as the author of the Arthur Crook series of detective novels published under the name of Anthony Gilbert . She was a highly esteemed writer of crime fiction and a member of the elite Detection Club, but the 'Anne Meredith' books were out of print for many years. -
E.C. Bentley
E. C. Bentley (full name Edmund Clerihew Bentley; 10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):
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Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."
Bentley was born in London and educated at St Paul's School and Merton College, Oxford. His father, John Edmund Bentley, was professionally a civil servant but was also a rugby union international having played in the first ever international match for England against Scotland in 1871. Bentley worked as a journalist on several newspapers, including the Da -
Mary Kelly
Mary Kelly was an English crime writer best known for the Inspector Brett Nightingale series. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Kelly was celebrated for the sense of refreshingly dark suspense in her mysteries. Her novel , published in 1961, won the Gold Dagger Award.
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George Bellairs
AKA Hilary Landon
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George Bellairs is the nom de plume of Harold Blundell, a crime writer and bank manager born in Heywood, near Rochdale, Lancashire, who settled in the Isle of Man on retirement. He wrote more than 50 books, most featuring the series' detective Inspector Littlejohn. He also wrote four novels under the alternative pseudonym Hilary Landon. -
Julian Symons
Julian Gustave Symons is primarily remembered as a master of the art of crime writing. However, in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and he held a distinguished reputation in each field.
Buy books on Amazon
His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day. It is for this that he was awarded various prizes, and, in 1982, named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America - an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain's -
Richard Hull
Richard Henry Sampson FCA (6 September 1896 – 1973), known by the pseudonym Richard Hull, was a British writer who became successful as a crime novelist with his first book in 1934.
Buy books on Amazon
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...
Note: At least two other authors with the same name: Richard Hull-illustrator & Richard Hull-non-fiction -
Ellen Wilkinson
Ellen Cicely Wilkinson PC (8 October 1891 – 6 February 1947) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death. As the Member of Parliament (MP) for Jarrow, she became a national figure when, in 1936, she figured prominently in the Jarrow March of the town's unemployed to London, to petition for the right to work. Although unsuccessful at the time, the march provided an iconic image for the 1930s, and helped to form post-Second World War attitudes to unemployment and social justice.
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Wilkinson was born into a poor though ambitious Manchester family, and embraced socialism at an early age. After graduating from the University of Manchester she worked for a women's suffrage organisation and -
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John G. Brandon
John Gordon Brandon (1879-1941) was an Australian-born writer who was initially a professional heavyweight boxer.
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He moved to England after the First World War and his first published novel was 'The Big Hunt' (1923). He wrote more than 120 novels, and numerous short stories which were published in 'The Thriller'. After writing another six novels in the 1920s, his most productive decade was the 1930s when he wrote 78 novels. Published posthumously, 'Death Skulks in Soho' (1959) would appear to be his final novel.
He wrote instalments in the long-running Sexton Blake series and his principal characters were Sexton Blake, Patrick Aloysius McCarthy and Arthur Stukeley Pennington.
His son was the writer Gordon Brandon.