of the great bibliophile Christopher Morley, William Hulbert Footner (1879–1944) decided to use him as a major character in The Mystery of the Folded Paper (1930), his first book about Amos Lee Mappin, an author and amateur criminologist who appeared in ten novels and resembles Charles Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick.
Footner was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and after he went to school in New York City and began his journalism career there, moved back to Canada to take a newspaper job in Alberta. He had brief careers as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. His early fiction reflects that northern locale as he set his mystery-adventure novels in northwest Canada. He returned to the United States and wrote detective stories and novels about Mappin and the breathtakingly gorgeous Madame Rosika Storey, who describes herself as “a practical psychologist—specializing in the feminine.” She is intuitive and highly intelligent, as well as being fearless, hunting down killers and going undercover to break up criminal gangs. She made her debut in The Under Dogs (1925) and appeared in eight additional books, mostly short collections such as Madame Storey (1926), The Velvet Hand: New Madame Storey Mysteries (1928), and The Almost Perfect Murder: More Madame Storey Mysteries (1933).
“The Almost Perfect Murder” was originally published in The Almost Perfect Murder (London, Collins, 1933).