THE AUTHOR OF mainly rather dull, lightweight detective novels produced soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as the creator of pedestrian adventure novels with which he began his career as a novelist, Edgar Alfred Jepson (1863–1938) is read today primarily as the translator of novels and stories from the French of Maurice Leblanc, for whom he brought to the English reading public many of the famous Arsene Lupin adventures. He also translated the once-popular novel The Man with the Black Feather (1912) by Gaston Leroux.
Born in London, he graduated from Baliol College, Oxford, then spent five years in Barbados before returning to take a job as editor at Vanity Fair. He became involved, albeit tangentially, with such members of the Decadent Movement as Ernest Dawson, John Gawsworth (with whom he collaborated on several short stories), and Arthur Machen. The first novel he wrote under his own name, Sibyl Falcon (1895), features a female adventurer, and he followed this with such fantasy novels as The Horned Shepherd (1904), about the worship of Pan. His son, Selwyn Jepson, was a prolific mystery writer, and his granddaughter is the noted British novelist Fay Weldon.
The only book Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (1854–1943) wrote by himself, under the pseudonymn Robert Eustace, was The Human Bacillus (1907), a crime novel, but he collaborated on mystery fiction with such popular authors as L. T. Meade, Gertrude Warden, and Dorothy L. Sayers, as well as Jepson.
“The Tea Leaf” was originally published in the October 1925 issue of The Strand Magazine.