The middle of things is written by J. S. Fletcher and the book starts with a chapter that contains Viner's aunt, Miss Bethia Penkridge, who had an insatiable appetite for fiction. She had no taste for the psychological or erotic; what she loved was a story which began with crime and ended with a detection. Nothing pleased her better than to go to bed with a brain titivated with the mysteries of the last three chapters. A dead silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackling of logs in the grate. The silvery chime of the clock on the mantelpiece brought her work and her words to a summary conclusion. Unconsciously Viner walked back close to his own Square, but on the opposite side to that by which he had left it. He was about to turn into a passage, a dark affair set between high walls when a young man darted hurriedly out of it. Viner often walked through that passage at night and had thought more than once that after nightfall the doors looked as if they had never been opened, never shut. It was queer, he reflected, that he scarcely ever remembered meeting anybody in that passage.
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.
