Francis Beeding is the pseudonym adopted by two men, John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders, who met while they were both working at the Geneva Secretariat of the League of Nations, where part of their first book, The Seven Sleepers (1925) is set. Palmer was a drama critic and a biographer of theatre people. Saunders was a decorated war hero and a war historian. The two had different backgrounds, but some of their interests, in writing mystery and spy thrillers, overlapped.
The Seven Sleepers was their first collaborative effort. Tom Preston sells hardware to buyers in other countries—an itinerant tinker, as he calls himself. In Geneva he is mistaken for a German member of a secret society working to rearm Germany to avenge the Versailles Treaty. The Seven Sleepers are financiers bankrolling this effort—they fear the huge reparations Germany still owes will result in the confiscation of their fortunes.
Tom visits the Secretariat to hand over to Henri Lavelle, an old wartime friend, a coded document he’s been handed by mistake. Also, an old flame, Beatrice Harvel, works there, and the fire starts up again on both sides. Then Lavelle is murdered and Beatrice kidnaped by the gang, and Tom must rescue her while getting the goods not only on the sleepers, but on the man for whom the coded document is intended, the man the sleepers want to lead Germany’s armies to new hegemony in Europe.
The book is the tradition of Buchan thrillers but displays an insider’s view of the secretariat as well as facility with the German language and familiarity with the capitals of Europe. It’s a page-turner, but with some of the sentimentality that Ambler and Greene’s grittier novels would eliminate. That casual Brit anti-Semitism is here, too; it strikes me as ironic in books that cast the pre-Third Reich Germans as villains.
The main villain here is Professor Anselm Kreutzemark of the hypnotic eyes, and he survives the book to tangle with Tom again in The Hidden Kingdom (1927).
Palmer and Saunders found a more enduring series character in Colonel Granby, who featured in eighteen novels written over as many years. When they turned their attention to mystery novels, the Francis Beeding duo did even better than their spy series. The House of Dr. Edwardes (1928), a psychological thriller, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945 as Spellbound. And their next mystery became a classic.
Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) was written when few detective stories concerned serial killers. It is set in the fictional East Anglian seaside village of Eastrepps, where the resort visitors clear out pretty fast once the “Eastrepps Evil”—as a London newspaperman dubs him—murders his second victim.
The plot is fairly complex. A rich broker visits his married mistress in Eastrepps once a week, setting up a complicated scheme so that it seems he spends two nights in a London hotel each week while working in the city, but in fact he travels back to Eastrepps on the second day to spend a night with her, pretending the next morning to arrive from London. Her ne’er-do-well cousin discovers this affair and attempts to blackmail them. Then several young women are murdered, and each of them, or their families, lost money in a stock scheme run by the broker years ago under a different name. A local fisherman who claims to have seen the murderer is killed next. The Scotland Yard man, Inspector Wilkins, investigates Alistair Rockingham, a mentally disturbed young nobleman living in Eastrepps with Higgins, his minder. Rockingham has been institutionalized for his behavior toward young women, and he has blackouts. Discovering that Rockingham gets out of the house where he is supposedly confined at night, Wilkins arrests him. But then the murders continue, and we see Rockingham for the red herring he is.
The police go for another suspect, and much of the book’s last third is taken up with his trial, but where we expect dramatic developments in the courtroom, we get instead a shocking conclusion to the trial. The solution only comes in the last chapter, when Wilkins, who’s been oddly out in solving the case, finally is shown the truth and manages in the nick of time to prevent two more murders.
A few blog writers on mystery have said smugly that they had guessed the culprit, but found the book entertaining anyway. They fail to see that their guessing the solution forms part of the authors’ clever plan. The reader is meant to guess the solution during the trial, then doubt her guess when the trial does not turn out as expected, and then find vindication in the last chapter when the book’s characters catch up with her astuteness.
I think this mystery has retained its popularity for almost a hundred years because of its deft use of red herrings, its plot complications, and its employment of what I would call the Watson/Hastings ploy (the reader is smarter than the detective’s assistants) and an extra turn on this ploy where for a few pages the reader is smarter than the detective. Vincent Starrett, the critic and Sherlock Holmes scholar, called this one of the ten best mysteries ever written, Martin Edwards includes it as one of his hundred in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), and it is in “The Definitive Library of Mystery Fiction” compiled by Howard Haycraft and updated by Ellery Queen.
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