‘David Hume’ was one of the pen names used by John Victor Turner (1900–1945), who was known to his family as Jack. He also wrote crime fiction as J. V. Turner and as ‘Nicholas Brady’, whose series character was the Reverend Ebenezer Buckle.
Born in Manchester in 1900, Jack Turner left school at sixteen to work on the Warwick Advertiser, and later moved to Walton in Staffordshire where he worked on a Leicestershire newspaper before joining the law courts staff of the national newspaper, the Daily Mail. After his wife committed suicide, the result of severe post-natal depression, Turner became crime reporter on the Daily Herald where he claimed to have a network of contacts in the London underworld. Drawing on his experience, he began writing fiction and his first novel, Bullets Bite Deep, was published in 1932. Its success led Hume to give up his career as a journalist and he went on to write dozens of fast-moving thrillers, many of which feature Mick Cardby, the ‘quick-decisioned, hard-slogging, amazingly intrepid younger partner in [a] famous firm of private detectives’.
Several of Turner’s books were made into films and, badged by his publisher as ‘the new Edgar Wallace’, he claimed at one time to be writing ‘a novel a fortnight’. Although none of his Hume or Brady novels were published by the Crime Club, it did publish two of the seven mysteries written as by J. V. Turner—Homicide Haven (1935) and Below the Clock (1936).
On 3 February 1945, Turner died at his home in Eastern Road, Haywards Heath, apparently after contracting tuberculosis. A few days later, he was cremated at Brighton crematorium, mourned by his children and his second wife, to whom he left only £300, equivalent to about £13,000 today.
‘He Stooped to Live’ was published by the Sunday Dispatch on 20 March 1938.