Murder at the Nook

A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery The house known as The Nook would have been a perfect place for the newly wedded Layngs to live while awaiting the completion of the house they built. Perfect, that is, except for the body of a young woman found under the kitchen floor while the couple are moving in. The corpse, whose identification is made uncertain by the injuries to the face and the several months the body had lain there before being discovered, appears to be of someone well known to the family, though oddly, Douglas Layng disputes this. All this leaves Chief Inspector Pointer the task of unraveling the usual mysteries of why and when and how the victim was murdered, but possibly also who the victim really was.

Author Biography

The identity of the author is as much a mystery as the plots of the novels. Two dozen novels were published from 1924 to 1944 as by Archibald Fielding, A. E. Fielding, or Archibald E. Fielding, yet the only clue as to the real author is a comment by the American publishers, H.C. Kinsey Co. that A. E. Fielding was in reality a “middle-aged English woman by the name of Dorothy Feilding whose peacetime address is Sheffield Terrace, Kensington, London, and who enjoys gardening.” Research on the part of John Herrington has uncovered a person by that name living at 2 Sheffield Terrace from 1932-1936. She appears to have moved to Islington in 1937 after which she disappears. To complicate things, some have attributed the authorship to Lady Dorothy Mary Evelyn Moore nee Feilding (1889-1935), however, a grandson of Lady Dorothy denied any family knowledge of such authorship. The archivist at Collins, the British publisher, reports that any records of A. Fielding were presumably lost during WWII. Birthdates have been given variously as 1884, 1889, and 1900. Unless new information comes to light, it would appear that the real authorship must remain a mystery.