THE HERO OF “The Monkey Trick” appears in only one collection of short stories by John Everard Gurdon (1898–1973) and both he and his creator are utterly unknown today. Although this short story presents a situation that is one of the most baffling in the realm of impossible crimes, and its solution one of the neatest, it does not appear to ever have been reprinted after its initial publication.
Gurdon was born in London and educated at Sandhurst Royal Military College. He served as an officer in the British army during World War I and suffered severe injuries, being invalided out in 1919. While he was recovering in the hospital, he began to write fiction, primarily on aviation subjects, both for adults and younger readers, mostly under the byline Capt. J. E. Gurdon, D.F.C. Among his adult thrillers are his first book, Over and Above (1919); Feeling the Wind (1924), about Kekulen, a superanarchist outsmarted by a British Secret Service Agent and a former R.F.C. pilot; and a story collection, The Sky Trackers (1931).
In addition to writing aviation stories for anthologies and such magazines as Modern Boys’ Annual and Air Stories, Gurdon wrote several popular young adult novels that were often reprinted, including Wings of Death (1929), The Kings’ Pipe (1934), The Secret of the Lab (1936), The Secret of the South (1950), and The Riddle of the Forest (1952). He also translated the nonfiction book The German Air Force in the Great War by Georg Paul Neumann. “The Monkey Trick” was first published in The Monkey Trick (London, Newnes, 1936).