Readers of mystery thrillers will find much to please them in this highly exciting story. It tells how Marjery Latimer living in a Bayswater boarding house was awakened one night by a scream. Slipping from her bed and crossing to the window she was in time to see a man hurrying down the street.The first of a series of crimes, which was to horrify the public and baffle the authorities had been committed!The mystery was further deepened by the strange behaviour of Marjory’s employer who, in the apparent effort to be rid of her, told her of another and more lucrative position.
Marjory acccepted, but to her dismay recognised in her new employer the man she had seen hurrying away from the scene of the crime. Then a second murder was committed and the hue & cry reached fever pitch as the re-doubled efforts of the police failed to bring the guilty to justice.
John Herbert Shelley Rowland (1907-1984) was a journalist, author and Unitarian minister. He read Freud, Huxley and, most avidly, H G Wells, who, believed Rowland, were it not for his preachiness, “might have been one of the greatest novelists of all the ages”.
Though he never considered himself a “novelist” – he began in what spare time he had to write thrillers. Between 1935 and 1950, Herbert Jenkins published seventeen detective novels by Rowland all featuring Inspector Henry Shelley of Scotland Yard.
[above biography of the author © http://winstongraham.yolasite.com].
Bloodshed in Bayswater, first published in 1935, was his first book.
Two of his later books, Murder in the Museum and Calamity in Kent have recently been republished by The British Library.