A journalist and historian who wrote extensively about his native Yorkshire, J. S. Fletcher also published detective fiction during almost half a century of prolific output. In a five-year period between 1920 and 1925, for example, he turned out seventeen whodunits, about which a reviewer for the New York Times commented, "Each one is an ingenious, cleverly constructed tale, distinctive in plot and incidents and written with as much zest and freshness as if it were his first. The type of mental equipment that can produce each year three or more complicated plots, each dressed out with multitudinous thrilling incidents, will always be a marvel to those who do not possess it." Early in his career he attracted a large audience for his detective fiction in Great Britain, and by the 1920s he rivaled in popularity the equally prolific Edgar Wallace; but in the United States Fletcher was relatively unknown...