Power on the Scent de Henrietta Clandon

Power on the Scent

Henrietta Clandon

"What you have in your mind is the possibility that someone put poison on a rose, and Mr. Morgan sniffed it up?" When stockbroker Montague Morgan-renowned among flower-growers as the creator of the "Rennavy Rose"-is found mysteriously dead in his own garden, attorney William Power is called into the case. Power invites his good friends the Mercers, Penny and Vincent, husband-and-wife detective novelists, to help him investigate the matter of Morgan's strange demise. Morgan's nephew is soon a likely suspect in his uncle's death, yet other questionable figures emerge, including beautiful widow Mrs. Davy-Renny and several men who hover around her. Also on the scene are professional sleuths Inspector Voce and Sergeant Bohm of Scotland Yard. With all this detective power on the scent, murder surely will out! "Henrietta Clandon's novels are always welcome. She has developed a style of her own in crime fiction." Anthony Berkeley

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Notă biografică

Vernon Loder was a pseudonym for John George Hazlette Vahey (1881-1938), an Anglo-Irish writer who also wrote as Henrietta Clandon, John Haslette, Anthony Lang, John Mowbray, Walter Proudfoot and George Varney. He was born in Belfast and educated at Ulster, Foyle College, and Hanover. Four years after he graduated college he was apprenticed to an architect and later tried his hand at accounting before turning to fiction writing full time. According to the copy of Loder's Two Dead (1934): "He once wrote a novel in twenty days on a boarding-house table, and had it serialised in U.S.A. and England under another name . . . He works very quickly and thinks two hours a day in the morning quite enough for any one. He composes direct on a machine and does not re-write." While perhaps this is an exaggeration, Hazlette was highly prolific, author of at least forty-four novels between 1926 and 1938. Hazlette's series characters were Inspector Brews, Chief Inspector R.J. "Terry" Chace, Donald Cairn (as Loder) and William Powell, Penny & Vincent Mercer (as Henrietta Clandon). With a solid reputation for witty characterisation and "the effortless telling of a good story" (Observer), Loder's popularity was later summed up in the Sunday Mercury: "We have no better writer of thrill mystery in England."