Philip MacDonald, one of the leading British writers of formal or Golden Age detective stories, remained until his death on 10 December 1980 one of the most mysterious figures in the world of detective fiction. Born in London on Guy Fawkes Day in a year variously given as 1896, 1899, and 1900, and which he described as "quite a long while ago," MacDonald was the son of the novelist Ronald MacDonald and the grandson of George MacDonald, author of such children's classics as At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872). Little is known of MacDonald's own life. He served in a cavalry regiment in Mesopotamia in World War I, trained horses for the British Army, and, after being invalided out, turned to show riding and jumping. In 1920 he began to write. His first two novels were written in collaboration with his father; in 1924 he published The Rasp...