The two-man team of “Francis Beeding” primarily seems remembered today for three things:

   1. They wrote The House of Dr. Edwardes (1927), a Gothic, woman-in-peril which was the basis (though not much actual detail is shared) for the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound.

   2. They wrote Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931), a crime novel highly praised by Vincent Starrett and reprinted in Dover’s fine mystery reprint series as late as 1980.

   3. They wrote a lot of spy novels few people today have read.

   Indeed they primarily wrote spy thrillers, many with their series character, spymaster Colonel Granby. But they also wrote other crime novels (novels deriving their interest from “regular” murders, not involving spies or criminal gangs) besides Eastrepps. These would be:

   1. Murder Intended (1932) (inverted mystery with multiple victims)

   2. The Emerald Clasp (1933) (appears to be another inverted, Before the Fact style mystery, have not yet read)

   3. The Norwich Victims (1935) (along with Eastrepps, their closest approach to a formal mystery novel, it appears)

   4. No Fury (1937) (another multiple murder story, imitative of Murder Intended, reprinted by rather distressingly literal-minded American publishers as Murdered: One by One)

   Also, Mr. Bobadil (1934) is a lost treasure chase novel and Pretty Sinister (1929), though it has ace spymaster Colonel Granby, involves a kidnapping gang. I’m not sure whether there are any others that can be taken out of the spy realm, possibly He Could Not Have Slipped (1939)?

   Anyway, I thought Murder Intended and The Norwich Victims were quite good and would be well worth reprinting. The latter was reprinted by Hodder in 1950, as well as made into an Emlyn Williams film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, in 1939, and is mentioned in the Catalogue of Crime (with less enthusiasm than I have for the book!).

   Does anyone have any familiarity with these presumably more obscure books, and any opinions on them? Or on any of the other Beeding books, for that matter. Beeding seems to me a good genre writer, and I wish “he” had dabbled more in the murder mystery field.

   From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:        [British editions only]

BEEDING, FRANCIS Pseudonym of Hilary St. George Saunders & John Palmer; other pseudonyms Barum Browne, Cornelius Cofyn, Christopher Haddon, David Pilgrim & John Somers. PK = Professor Kreutzemark; AG = Colonel (General) Alistair Granby; IW = Inspector Wilkins; RB = Ronald Briercliffe; GM = Insp. George Martin.

BROWNE, BARUM Pseudonym of Geoffrey Dennis & Hilary St. George Saunders.

COFYN, CORNELIUS Pseudonym of Hilary St. George Saunders & John deVere Loder

HADDON, CHRISTOPHER Pseudonym of John Palmer.

PILGRIM, DAVID Pseudonym of John Palmer & Hilary St. George Saunders.

SOMERS, JOHN Pseudonym of John Palmer & Hilary St. George Saunders.

   As promised in the update at the end of the previous post, here are the appearances of Lt. Columbo in print. Some of these are becoming difficult to find, even with the assistance of the Internet to help track them down. I wish I were able to show you covers of all of them, but it would be rather crowded if I did, or if I could. Some I don’t have copies of myself.

LT. COLUMBO in book form –

* RICHARD LEVINSON & WILLIAM LINK:

* ALFRED LAWRENCE:

* HENRY CLEMENT:

* LEE HAYS:

* BILL MAGEE & CARL SCHENCK:

* WILLIAM HARRINGTON:

   Acknowledgments go as almost always to Allen J. Hubin, Crime Fiction IV, as the primary source for most of this data.

   I’ll also take this an opportunity to thank Mark Murphy one more time for pointing out where I could go on the web to keep finding more information about Lt. Columbo. In his most recent email to me, he added: “A guy named Mark Dawidziak wrote a book, The Columbo Phile, some years ago. It was quite authoritative. I’ve also found this link to an interview with him…”

   He’s right. There are commercials in this on-the-air interview, but you can skip them, and it’s very much worth listening to.

   To sum things up, I hope, without too many more updates, Columbo as a character has been around long enough, and he’s been popular enough, that there’s plenty of information out there on him, either in print or on the Internet. In these last couple of blog entries, I don’t imagine that I’ve added anything that’s really new about him, but hopefully I’ve presented what I’ve discovered in a straight-forward and useful fashion. I’ve also ironed out some of the contradictions popped up as I went along, and tried to set the record straight on a few statements I found that were either incomplete or simply not so.

   Or to put it another way, I certainly learned a lot.

I recently read and reviewed an obscure one-shot mystery from the 1950s in which the amateur detective was also newly hired as a real estate seller. In fact the murder occurred during a open house she was holding. The book was Held Open for Death, by Evelyn Payne (Arcadia House, 1958), in case you were wondering, and if you’d like to read the review, here is where you may.

What I wondered out loud when I wrote the review was how many other real estate agents can you think of who’ve been called upon to solve mysteries over the years, either as a series character or as a one-shot deal?

If you want to sell your house quickly for cash, you can contact a local cash buyer with strong knowledge of the real estate market. Homeowners who type sell my house for cash bothell are often looking for a fast, hassle-free way to sell their property.

I also asked the question on DorothyL, and while some of answers were obvious ones, the people who hang out there know their stuff. Several of the responses were of authors and characters I’d never have come up with on my own, no matter how long you’d left me to do so, nor how many reference books I had access to.

The first reply was from Debbie Bogenschutz:

The realtor-detective in the McClellan books was Schuyler Ridgeway, described online, where I immediately went to look her up, as “feisty” and “spunky.”

From the plot outlines of the Teagarden books, of which there are seven, Three Bedrooms, One Corpse appears to be the one most closely related to the real estate business: “Basking in an inheritance that makes her financially independent, Roe’s looking for a new occupation. Her days as a librarian are over. Real estate might be fun, she thinks. And who better to teach her the tricks of the trade than her Lauren Bacall look-alike mother, Aida Brattle Teagarden Queensland, who happens to own one of the major real estate firms in town?”

Go here for plot summaries of all of Aurora�s adventures in solving murders.

The next email was from John McFetridge:

The book doesn’t exactly fit the “cozy” profile I had in mind for the category, but I certainly agree that it fits the category. Thanks, John, and good luck with the book.

John’s reply:

From Diana Vickery, an email brief and to the point:

Ben Abbott is described online as a small town Connecticut real estate agent and private investigator. There are four in the series, including McMansion, which came out only last month. The three earlier ones are:

I know of these books, and I haven’t read any of them. What with the private eye aspect of the character and the small town Connecticut setting, I don’t know why. I will make it a point to definitely do something about that. (And more about Justin Scott in an upcoming post, if all goes well.)

PS. Check out Diana’s Cozy Library website. It is what it says and more. The reviews, most if not all of them written by Diana, are both informed and informative.

Posted on DorothyL was this response from Bente Gallagher:

The first line of Maggie Sefton’s Dying to Sell reads this way: “In Fort Collins, Colorado Shamrock Realty realtor Kate Doyle detests having to sell the home of friends, attorney Mark and Amanda Schuster, who have filed for divorce.”

When Mark is murdered, Amanda is suspected. While Maggie Sefton has written three “Knitting Mysteries,” this is the only “Real Estate Mystery” listed on her website.    Beth Groundwater mentioned the same book.

A description of Nina Wright’s books: “The humorous Whiskey Mattimoe mystery series is set in the scenic Lake Michigan resort town of Magnet Springs. Suddenly widowed at age 33, realtor Whiskey Mattimoe finds herself saddled with her late husband’s diva dog, Abra the Afghan hound, who has the unfortunate and felonious habit of stealing purses. That’s bad for business but not as bad as having clients die on site. A string of deaths at properties that she manages forces Whiskey to solve murders in order to stay solvent.” At present (or soon), there are (will be) three books in the series, with one more on the way:

Check out the author’s website for more information.

Today on DorothyL, the following message was posted by Caroline Craig:

Absolutely. From the author’s website, there are four books in the Belle Palmer series:

The “middle-aged” Belle is a realtor who lives in northern Ontario, which helps to explain the titles. Based on online descriptions, it is difficult to say how much of the real estate business is involved in each one of the books, but a realtor is what she is.

And as of today, this is where the checklist stands. Thanks to all who’ve contributed, and if you can come up with any that I’ve missed, then by all means, let me know.

UPDATE: Later the same day. I am not sure how or why things like this happen, but they do. My monthly shipment of Worldwide Mysteries arrived from Harlequin today, and one of the three was … Maggie Sefton’s Dying to Sell. Maybe that means I am destined to read it, and I think I shall. By the way, you can only get the Worldwide books by subscription and through the mail now, is that so? You can’t buy them in stores? This paperback edition isn’t even listed on Amazon.com.