The orange-yellow diamond is written by J. S. Fletcher. This murder mystery from the 1920s, which is set in London, pulls off the amazing feat of being both incredibly racist and impressively diverse. On the one hand, a terrific lower-class Jewish amateur detective is the unquestionable hero and intellectual center of the whole thing and stars in the happy ending; on the other, Horrendous Stereotype Klaxon. All which said, this book features a London full of thriving immigrants (Maltese, Scots, Burmese, Japanese, and South Africans, many of them not actually murderers despite the book's high body count) is actually much more offensive than modern historical that present London as all-white and predominantly upper class plus servants. In a parallelogram formed by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed Street on the north, Edgware Road on the east, and Spring Street on the west lie a collection of mean streets on the southern edge of the populous parish of Paddington. The drab dullness of these streets stands in striking contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, which are nearby. The keen observer will always notice in these streets all those indications of the gloomy semi-poverty that are more pronounced in London than in any other English metropolis.
J.S.Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author, regarded to be a leading writers of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Fletcher was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1863, the son of a clergyman. His father was expired when he was only eight months old and he was brought up by his grandmother in Yorkshire. When he was eighteen, Fletcher went to London to study Law and this understanding of crime was of great use to him in his career as a writer of mystery and adventure. He was educated at Silcoates School in Wakefield. He was fellow of the Royal Historical Society who had studied law before turning to journalism. His literary career covered approximately 200 books on a wide variety of subjects including fiction, non fiction, histories, historical fiction, and mysteries. His first published novel was a historical novel, When Charles the First was King (1892). The Middle Temple Murder is a famous novel of Fletcher. In 1914, Fletcher wrote his first detective novel and move on to write over a hundred more, many featuring the private investigator Ronald Camberwell. Fletcher married the novelist and playwright Rosamund Langbridge. Fletcher expired in Surrey in 1935.
