Photo: Francesco Da Vinci/Getty Images (c.1992)
Sample of authors
Gardner, John (f. 1926)
John Edmund Gardner was a British novelist. He was born in the village of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland as the son of a clergyman. He briefly attended Cottham’s Preparatory School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1931, and after the family had moved to Wantage in Berkshire in 1933, King Alfred’s School 1934–1943. He joined the Home Guard at the start of the Second World War and in 1943 the Royal Marin...
Literary figures
Beatrice Lestrange Bradley
Gender: Female
Famous psychologist, honorary PhD at several universities, but eccentric and very unsympathetic. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, resident in Wandles Parva, a little village in Hampshire, is middle-aged, has black hair, a masculine build and a narrow face which can assume a snake-like appearance. She has been married and has children, but she devotes her interest to solving cases in novels by...