as Fidelity Dove, the angelic-looking girl whose ethereal beauty has made emotional slaves of many men. She is a fearless and inventive crook whose “gang” consists of a lawyer, a businessman, a scientist, and other devoted servants. She always wears gray, partly because the color matches well with her violet eyes but also because it reflects her strict, puritanical life. She is committed to righting wrongs, to helping those who cannot help themselves, while also being certain that the endeavor is profitable to herself.
She is the creation of William Edward Vickers (1889–1965) under the nom de plume David Durham, and appears in a single collection of short stories, The Exploits of Fidelity Dove (1924), one of the rarest volumes of crime fiction of the twentieth century; it was reissued eleven years later as by Roy Vickers.
Her frustrated adversary is Detective-Inspector Rason, who, against his will, is fond of Fidelity, respects her exceptional intelligence, and seems bemused by her criminal endeavors. He finds greater success when he joins the Department of Dead Ends, Vickers’s other memorable series. This obscure branch of Scotland Yard has the unenviable task of trying to solve crimes that have been abandoned as hopeless. The stories in this series are “inverted” detective tales in which the reader witnesses the crime being committed, is aware when the incriminating clue is discovered, and follows the police methods that lead to the arrest. The department’s unusual cases are recorded in several short story collections, beginning with the Queen’s Quorum title The Department of Dead Ends (1947); the British edition of 1949 contains mostly different stories.
“The Meanest Man in Europe” was originally published in The Exploits of Fidelity Dove (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1924).