IT IS UNLIKELY that you have ever heard of Nicholas Olde, less likely that you have read his only mystery book, the very scarce short-story collection The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern, and a veritable certainty that you know nothing about him—a true man of mystery. An exhaustive search through my substantial reference library and an exhausting search of the Internet revealed not a single word about him other than his authorship of that elusive volume of detective stories.
The indefatigable researcher into the world of mystery fiction, Allen J. Hubin, uncovered the fact that Nicholas Olde was the pseudonym of Amian Lister Champneys (1879–1951), which encompasses the entire known universe of information about the author. Examination of the text of his book reveals a bit more about his detective hero, Rowland Hern. In the manner of Sherlock Holmes (whose adventures were emulated by countless authors during Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime), Hern is a genius private detective with a sidekick who is amazed at his friend’s brilliance and narrates the stories in first person. The stories are not very violent and, in fact, seldom deal with murder, focusing instead on crimes and capers, often in a light and breezy manner that has been compared with many of G. K. Chesterton’s tales. The murder in the present story does not break new ground, but was not yet the cliché that it became after its publication. While he is certainly a minor writer, Olde’s relatively brief tales may be read with pleasure if the reader is not overly insistent on realism.
“The Invisible Weapon” was first published in The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern (London, Heinemann, 1928).