Author of twenty detective novels and two volumes of short stories over a career of more than thirty years, Henry Wade (the pseudonym for Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher) was born in Surrey on 10 September 1887. He was a baronet, educated at Eton College and New College, Oxford. Marriage in 1911 to Mary Augusta Chilton resulted in four sons and a daughter. Wade was also a decorated officer of the Grenadier Guards in both world wars and (from 1925) the high sheriff of Buckinghamshire. He has frequently been acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the classic detective fiction of the Golden Age of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Like John Dickson Carr's, Wade's work is carefully plotted; like Margery Allingham's or Anthony Berkeley's, crime is contingent on something gone wrong with the established English social world through the terrors and upheavals of World War I.

For example, in Wade's third novel...