Valentine Williams was a gifted writer with a journalist's ability to get the story and hold his readers' attention. While he wrote both detective and spy fiction and held strong opinions on how each should be written, it is for his tales of the British Secret Service and its struggle against the villain Dr. Adolph Grundt, known as Clubfoot, that Williams is remembered. As Williams himself remarked in his autobiography, The World of Action (1938), it was the villains of fiction who fascinated him. The hero was most effective in conjunction with a plausible and human villain. Despite the variety of his other published work, Williams is best known for creating Clubfoot, just as Sax Rohmer is remembered for Fu Manchu.

Williams had just two basic tenets of writing fiction, both of which are expounded in every article he wrote on the mechanics of the mystery genre. First, while...