Happy Birthday Henry Wade

Note: Born in 1887, veteran of WWI Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet KStJ CVO DSO, was Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1954 to 1961. Under a pen-name, he was also one of the leading authors during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. In their classic reference book Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor said of him: “Though insufficiently known in the US, Wade is one of the great figures of the classical period. He was not only very productive but also varied in genre. His plots, characters, situations, and means rank with the best, while his prose has elegance and force.”

Lonely Magdalen: A Murder Story – Henry Wade

In this classic English detective story from 1940, a sex worker is found strangled in a park in Hampstead Heath. Scotland Yard is called in and young insightful Inspector Poole is assigned a case that is rapidly growing cold. With no clues, he inquires into the background of the victim.

So right away we depart from Golden Age mystery. Mercifully. Instead of a loathsome uncle poisoned in a library in a country house, we have a gritty urban setting, with the victim a woman of the town, worn out and in the abyss, killed brutally.  We are not treated to the usual troop of suspects gathered in a room as a climax. Wade spurns police worship, because here the cops are prone to human error and their irresponsible lack of professionalism leads to an ambiguous reveal. Uncertainty in a reveal is a rarity in mysteries up to WWII. Worry not however: in the 2013 edition Arcturus released they provided a map of the scene of the crime, a mainstay of Golden Age mysteries.

Henry Wade started his career with mainstream puzzlers and made his way over to more stimulating police procedurals and crime novels. This mystery features a middle section that is more like a flashback in that it describes the backstory of the victim (another departure: usually victims in the Golden Age were barely sketched out). Unlike Golden Age writers who want to spare the feelings of the reader, Wade assumes we can handle settings, incidents and motives without seeking out the fainting couch and sending the maid to fetch the sal volatile. Chronicling how drinking devastated the lives of the victim and her husband, Wade is ahead of his time when he theorizes about a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, a possibility today's experts are learning more about.

Wade wrote as many as 22 detective novels or story collections between 1926 and 1957. The Hanging Captain and Mist on the Saltings were published by Harper Perennial in a series of great re-issues in the Eighties.