DESCRIBED AS “The Simenon of South Africa,” Peter Godfrey (1917–1992) was a playwright, broadcaster, and journalist who was exiled to London from his native country for his outspoken opposition to apartheid. He wrote hundreds of short stories, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, which were translated into eight languages. However, until Crippen & Landru published The Newtonian Egg (2002), he had had only one book published, Death Under the Table (1954), a very rare collection of detective stories issued by the obscure South African publishing house S. A. Scientific Publishing Co., the address of which was a post office box in Cape Town.
Godfrey’s series character, lawyer and psychologist Rolf le Roux, with his assistants Inspector Joubert, Sergeant Johnson, and Doc McGregor, works in Cape Town and provides a look into every corner of that great international city. The homicide squad and le Roux confront the most elusive type of mystery, the seemingly impossible crime, and display extraordinary intelligence in their solutions. One case challenges them to understand how a quantity of cyanide got inside an unbroken hard-boiled egg. Another, published in Death Under the Table, “The Wanton Murders,” served as the basis for the 1957 motion picture The Girl in Black Stockings, which starred Anne Bancroft.
“The Flung-Back Lid” was first published in John Creasey’s Crime Collection (London, Gollancz, 1979). It is a rewritten and improved version of “Out of This World,” first collected in Death Under the Table (Cape Town, South Africa, S. A. Scientific Publishing Co., 1954).