Though his fiction often dealt with crime and murder, James Hilton's place in the mystery genre rests on a single book, Murder at School: A Detective Fantasia, which was published in 1931, before he achieved his enormous success as a popular novelist. Hilton is one of the first British novelists to use his own teaching experience and set a mystery in a school.

Born 9 September 1900 in Leigh, Lancashire, Hilton was the son of John and Elizabeth Burch Hilton. His father was a master, and his mother had been a teacher before her marriage. Hilton grew up in London and attended the Leys School and Christ's College, Cambridge University. He published his first novel, Catherine Herself (1920), when he was still at Cambridge, but he had limited success as a writer for more than a decade. As a result, he supported himself during part of that time as a teacher, acquiring...