Though extensively trained as a scientist, Charles Percy Snow became one of the most productive and accomplished fiction writers of his generation. He is best known, certainly, for the eleven highly autobiographical novels that make up the "Strangers and Brothers" sequence. But Snow also produced two very effective detective novels, Death Under Sail (1932) and A Coat of Varnish (1979). These well-constructed and widely praised works strongly suggest that Snow's literary career would have been equally successful had he more frequently channeled his narrative skills into the mystery genre.

Snow, the second of four children, was born on 15 October 1905 in what he once labeled a "petty-bourgeois-cum-proletarian" suburb of Leicester, an industrial city located in the British Midlands. Snow's mother, Ada, was the daughter of servants; his father, William, worked at a local shoe factory and played the organ at area church services, despite the fact that--unlike his wife--he refused to...