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"A lot of quiet people are sitting about talking, and one of them suddenly feels there will be murder done. And it was!"
The narrator of This Delicate Murder is Penny Mercer, murder-mystery author. She and novelist-husband Vincent are invited by Lionel Fonders to a shooting-party at Chustable Manor, where the other guests are mostly fellow-writers of various types. But Penny and Vincent become embroiled in a vexing murder case when their host is fatally shot in the field. Fonders was not generally beloved, but it is Vincent himself who becomes the chief suspect in his host’s unnatural death.
In his attempt to clear himself, he enlist the help of clever attorney and amateur sleuth William Power to find the fiend who put paid to Fonders. With so many jealous authors at hand, the field of suspicion is wide. Can you keep pace with Power?
"Nearly watertight impeccability" Observer
"Henrietta Clandon’s novels are always welcome. She has developed a style of her own in crime fiction." Anthony Berkeley
About the author
Vernon Loder was a pseudonym for John George Hazlette Vahey (1881-1938), an Anglo-Irish writer who also wrote as Henrietta Clandon, John Haslette, Anthony Lang, John Mowbray, Walter Proudfoot and George Varney. He was born in Belfast and educated at Ulster, Foyle College, and Hanover. Four years after he graduated college he was apprenticed to an architect and later tried his hand at accounting before turning to fiction writing full time.
According to the copy of Loder's Two Dead (1934): "He once wrote a novel in twenty days on a boarding-house table, and had it serialised in U.S.A. and England under another name . . . He works very quickly and thinks two hours a day in the morning quite enough for any one. He composes direct on a machine and does not re-write." While perhaps this is an exaggeration, Hazlette was highly prolific, author of at least forty-four novels between 1926 and 1938.
Hazlette's series characters were Inspector Brews, Chief Inspector R.J. "Terry" Chace, Donald Cairn (as Loder) and William Powell, Penny & Vincent Mercer (as Henrietta Clandon).
With a solid reputation for witty characterisation and "the effortless telling of a good story" (Observer), Loder's popularity was later summed up in the Sunday Mercury: "We have no better writer of thrill mystery in England."
