Well Now, Call It a Shroud

Over fifty years of writing, the British detective author René Brabazon Raymond (1906–1985) published about ninety crime novels and used several creative pen names. The most famous of them is James Hadley Chase.

“Like a bloodhound, I take up the scent and sense what the reader wants—and what he will buy,” the master explained the success of his novels, eagerly revealing the gold-bearing secret: readers are drawn by “action and rhythm.” In the 20th century, there was no room for slow, old-fashioned stories in which an eccentric detective investigates a mysterious murder of an aristocrat in the cozy scenery of a country house; under the laws of the new time, the detective fires a revolver—almost more often than he uses deduction.