In the mid-1930s, many national newspapers in Britain published short stories and serials, with mysteries proving to be particularly fruitful. One of the most popular weeklies was the Sunday Dispatch which, in 1938, commissioned two series of stories from the Crime Club, a publishing imprint created by the publishers William Collins. In his definitive and lavishly illustrated history of Collins Crime Club, The Hooded Gunman (2019), John Curran recounts how it evolved out of the publishers’ earlier initiative, the Detective Story Club, to become the best-known and longest-lived brand in crime and mystery fiction. Between 1930 and 1994, a total of 2,012 Crime Club books were published, including titles by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and many of the biggest names of the genre.
The first tranche of stories commissioned by the Sunday Dispatch, all six of which are included here, appeared weekly between 6 March and 10 April 1938. Each of the six writers, including the series ‘compère’ Peter Cheyney, who also wrote the first story, and William Collins himself, who wrote the last, was challenged to write a short story around the following plot:
‘One night a man picked up an orange in the street. This saved his life.’