HIS SLIM OUTPUT prevents Charles Daly King (1895–1963) from being ranked at the top rung of detective fiction writers, but he has produced some masterly works, notably in The Curious Mr. Tarrant, selected by Ellery Queen for his Queen’s Quorum as one of the 106 most important volumes of mystery short stories of all time, where it was described as containing “the most imaginative detective short stories of our time.”
Born in New York City, King graduated from Yale University, received his master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, and a PhD from Yale for an electromagnetic study of sleep. He was a practicing psychologist who wrote several books on the subject, including Beyond Behaviorism (1927), The Psychology of Consciousness (1932), and the posthumously published States of Human Consciousness (1963). In the 1930s, King divided his time between Summit, New Jersey, and Bermuda, where he wrote his detective novels. With the advent of World War II, he stopped writing mysteries and devoted the rest of his life to his work in psychology. As a mystery writer, King is an enigmatic figure, at times writing brilliantly with the verve and assurance of a master; at other times he is as frustrating as the club bore who tells the same stories over and over again. He once inserted a fifteen-page treatise on economic theory into a detective novel for absolutely no reason.
“The Episode of the Codex’ Curse” was first published in The Curious Mr. Tarrant (London, Collins, 1935).