Harcourt and Henry Wade

Just when I thought I’d finished my set of essays for the Harcourt Encyclopaedia, the phone went and the editor, Barry Forshaw, asked me to write something about Henry Wade. It’s a pleasure to do a short piece, because if there is one Golden Age British writer who deserves to be better known, in my opinion it is Henry Wade.

‘Henry Wade’ was the name under which Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher wrote varied, thoughtful and entertaining crime fiction for thirty years. His career stretched from the 1920s to the late 1950s, when psychological suspense was coming to the fore. He played an important part in the development of the genre, especially but not only in the credible portrayal of the business of detection, and the ordinary people whose lives are changed by crime. I am really not sure why his gifts have long been under-estimated by commentators, who are apt to bracket him with the so-called ‘humdrum’ writers such as John Rhode.

Aubrey-Fletcher had a distinguished military career during the First World War, and several of the Henry Wade novels reflect his understanding of the impact that conflict had on those who lived through it. The Dying Alderman (1930) is a capable whodunit with neat use of a ‘dying message’ clue, but Mist on the Saltings (1933) is even more effective; a study in character that was ahead of its time. The novel also benefited from an evocative setting on the East Anglian coast. Released for Death (1938) presents a sympathetic picture of a criminal exploited after leaving jail by a career villain.

Lonely Magdalen (1940) is even better, offering a realistic yet gripping account of an investigation into the apparently commonplace murder of a prostitute whose body is found on Hampstead Heath. The book, structurally very accomplished, is written in three sections; the central part of the book details the dead woman’s misadventures in her younger days before the police inquiry resumes following her identification. This novel, like many of Wade’s best, features Inspector John Poole, a shrewd and sympathetic Oxford-educated detective whose other cases include a very enjoyable ‘inverted mystery’, Too Soon to Die (1954.)

I’m not suggesting that everything he wrote was a masterpiece. But many of them still read well today. His work bridged the gap between the detective novel as game and the crime novel focusing on character. Henry Wade also had a far better understanding of police procedure than most of his contemporaries - and he described it well.