WILLIAM EDWARD VICKERS (1889–1965) had a successful publishing career in England, which did not carry across the Atlantic until Ellery Queen discovered his work. Vickers produced books and stories under the pseudonyms David Durham, Sefton Kyle, John Spencer, and the best-known Roy Vickers. Among his most popular works are the “inverted” detective stories that appeared in several collections, most notably The Department of Dead Ends (1947; the expanded British edition of 1949 has mainly different contents). In this challenging type of detective story, the reader witnesses the crime, is present when the incriminating clue is finally discovered, and follows the police methods leading to arrest. Queen found one of these stories, “The Rubber Trumpet,” in an old English magazine, liked it, and reprinted it in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, leading to several of Vickers’s books being published in the United States.
The other enduring character created by Vickers, under the Durham pseudonym, was Fidelity Dove, an angelic-looking young woman who is one of the most inventive and successful of all fictional crooks. Her ethereal beauty has made slaves of most of the men who meet her, especially her “gang,” which consists of a lawyer, a scientist, a businessman, and others whose specialized knowledge assist in her nefarious undertakings. Her frustrated adversary is Detective Inspector Rason, who has greater success when he heads the Department of Dead Ends.
“The Gulverbury Diamonds” was first published in The Exploits of Fidelity Dove (London, Hodder, 1924); it is one of the rarest mystery books published in the twentieth century. The short-story collection was reissued in 1935 with the same title but under the Roy Vickers name.