John Garland's Crime of the Crossword, which dates from 1940, is an obscure book. I have Lucy Bratton to thank for drawing my attention to it. I didn't know anything about Garland and wondered if the name was a pseudonym. The dust jacket blurb suggests that he was an established writer, but gives no biographical information and (like many blurbs) needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. But thanks to Jamie Sturgeon's helpful research, I now know that the Garland pen-name was adopted by Harold William Twyman (1873-1971), a London-born periodical editor and journalist who also published under the name of A. Cartwright as well as under his own colours.
The publisher, Columbine Publishing Ltd of Great Russell Street in London, seems to have been a short-lived concern which went into liquidation a couple of years after this book came out. They don't seem to have made much impact and I imagine they focused on the pulpier kind of fiction. But Garland's writing seems quite professional to me and on a par with that of authors like Gerald Verner or Edwy Searles Brooks. The prose is serviceable rather than enticing and the storyline focuses on incident rather than ingenuity of plot.
One associates crossword puzzles with the more cerebral type of Golden Age whodunit, but although in the early pages I thought Garland was going to set up a whodunit mystery, in fact this is a thriller. There is indeed a crossword (with the solution included at the end of the book, a pleasing touch) but although it provides a clue to a criminal mystery, overall it is just a fun embellishment to a breezy action story.
At the start of the book a businessman called Kerkoff is found dead in mysterious circumstances. A detective in the gentlemanly tradition, Rex Barringer, is engaged by a rather dodgy character who spins an unlikely yarn about Kerkoff's death, but Rex soon realises that his client has a great deal to hide. This is quite an enjoyable yarn and I'm surprised that (apparently) Garland did not continue to write light thrillers in this vein.
Thank you so much for this! I've had a mild obsession with this book sine I came across a mention of it in Marc Romano's 2006 book "Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession."
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until 2020 when a few copies surfaced online and I immediately purchased one and after reading it a few times and converting it into an e-book, I still wanted to know more about the author and until now, I hadn’t come across anyone who shared this interest. I’m happy to have discovered that someone has uncovered a “clue” into this books backstory.
-Jayson