A BIOGRAPHER OF THE British royal family for decades, (Henry) Hector Bolitho (1898–1974) was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and settled in England in 1922. He traveled extensively to every part of the world, including the Antipodes at twenty-one with the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), and claimed to prefer America to all the rest “because the people are honest and comparatively true.” He served in the military in both world wars, on the home front in New Zealand at eighteen and later with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as an intelligence officer. He began his writing career as a journalist at seventeen, produced his first novel at twenty-five, and went on to write more than thirty volumes as a sort of unofficial biographer and historian of the royal family. His biography of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert the Good and the Victorian Reign (1932) is regarded as one of the greatest of all works about the royal family. He also edited the letters of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Bolitho once publicly declared that he was free of ambition and content to be a second-rate writer because he found life to be far more interesting than anything he could create with his pen. His early fiction took the form of historical adventure novels and short stories, few of which are remembered today.
“The House in Half Moon Street” was first published in his collection The House in Half Moon Street (London, Cobden-Sanderson, 1935).