Dorothy L. Sayers began writing Whose Body?, her first Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, in London in January 1921, when she was was 27 years old.  A letter that month from Sayers to her mother reveals that the novel rather changed in the writing. In the novel as published the naked body discovered in the bath belongs to a "semitic-looking stranger" who is...

"Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?"

"You are concerned with sensationalism, Mr. Strickland."

--John Dickson Carr's Scandal at High Chimneys (1959)

One more Philip MacDonald detective fiction review and then on to something else.  This one's of The Wraith, the sixth Anthony Gethryn crime novel and the first of three which the author published in 1931.  By the way, I now think this is the correct chronological bibliographical information on the Gethryn novels.  

Where did Philip MacDonald derive the pen name "Martin Porlock"?  My theory: he got the name by combining two villages in far northeastern Devon, about twenty-five miles apart by Exmoor National Forest, Combe Martin and Porlock.  One of the early crime fiction books MacDonald wrote with his father Ronald, The Spandau Quid, was said...

Mystery writer Philip MacDonald completed the manuscript of Mystery at Friar's Pardon in August 1931 and in England it was published, under his new mystery writer pseudonym Martin Porlock, in October.  The book was not published in the United States.  Pardon was one of seven (!) novels published that year by MacDonald, the others being th...