(1912–1987) and Richard Wilson Webb (1901–c.1970) collaborated on the series featuring Peter and Iris Duluth, but both authors were part of a coterie of writers that mixed and matched on many other books published as by Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. It was when Wheeler and Webb moved to the United States in the 1930s that they created the Duluth series, which changed their books from a recognizably British style to American in speech and tone.
Wheeler and Webb created the Patrick Quentin byline with A Puzzle for Fools (1936), which introduced Peter Duluth, a theatrical producer who stumbles into detective work by accident, and Iris Pattison, an actress suffering from melancholia whom he meets at a sanitarium where he has gone to treat his alcoholism. He eventually marries her. Iris is irresistibly curious about mysteries and draws her husband into helping her solve them. The highly successful Duluth series of nine novels inspired two motion pictures, Homicide for Three (1948), starring Warren Douglas as Peter and Audrey Long as his wife, Iris, and Black Widow (1954), with Van Heflin (Peter), Gene Tierney (Iris), Ginger Rogers, George Raft, and Peggy Ann Garner. Webb dropped out of the collaboration in the early 1950s and Wheeler continued using the Quentin name but abandoned the Duluth series to produce stand-alone novels until 1965.
Oddly, all the Duluth novels were published using the Patrick Quentin nom de plume but the short stories were originally published as by Q. Patrick—until they, as well as non-series stories, were collected in The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories (1961), which was selected for Queen’s Quorum.
“Murder with Flowers” was originally published in the December 1941 issue of The American Magazine; it was first collected in The Puzzles of Peter Duluth by Patrick Quentin (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2016).