A couple of weeks ago I posted all I knew about mystery writer Mark Strange, who doesn’t exist and never did. The one book “he” wrote was the collaborative effort of three women and one man, all friends and/or related to one another. I invite you to go back and read about the authors. This post, though, is about the novel itself, as British bookseller Jamie Sturgeon has found a copy, and he’s passed along to me what he’s learned about it.

   First, here’s the entry as it appears in the Addenda to the revised edition of Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      STRANGE, MARK. Joint pseudonym of Adrian Leslie Stephen, Karin Costelloe Stephen, Marjorie Colville Strachey, & Rachel Costelloe Strachey, q.q.v. Under this pen name, the author of one novel in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV; see below:
         Midnight. Faber, hc, 1927. [Academia; England]

   Here from Jamie is more about the book:

      Steve,

   It looks like a fairly typical 1920s murder mystery, set in a women’s teacher training college. There’s a plan of the ground floor of the college opposite the title page. Here is the authors’ note after the title page:

      AUTHORS’ NOTE:

    “THIS story was the work of four people, M., A., R., and K. The method adopted was simple and can be recommended to those readers who feel sure that they could themselves write a detective story if it was not so much trouble. M., A. and K. discussed the plot and then wrote alternate chapters until the book was completed in outline. R. was then called upon and then inserted 10,000 additional words distributed evenly among the different parts. The authors defy the public to trace their separate hands or locate the padding.”

   Here’s a scan of the ground floor plan mentioned above: