About the book

About The Black Wings: A Golden Age Mystery

‘Very good’ The Times ‘Handles with dexterity a very complicated plot’ Evening Standard First republication of this ultra-rare Moray Dalton crime novel for almost a century This 2023 Spitfire Publishers edition includes a comprehensive bibliography of Moray Dalton’s crime fiction The body was found lying face downwards in the top floor flat of number 7 Bolsover Square, Westminster. Killed by a glancing blow from a wood chopper which struck the nape of the neck and severed the main artery. What linked this gruesome murder with Sir Roger Wing who had been dining in the flat below with his publisher friend Christopher Penistone? The aristocratic Wing family had for centuries resided at the Mallowes, a remote country house perched above a beach on the West Sussex coast. Was the arrival at the Mallowes of an anonymous letter for Sir Roger that same day just a coincidence? And what could this have to do with the looting of precious gems from the Medici family tomb in Florence in 1818 by Sir Roger’s great-grandfather? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Moray Dalton was the pen name of Katherine Mary Deville Dalton Renoir. Katherine was born in 1881 in Hammersmith, London to an American father and a Canadian mother. After writing two mainstream novels, her first crime novel, The Kingsclere Mystery was published in 1924. She would write a total of twenty-nine crime novels by 1951. One of many female writers who chose a male pseudonym to compete in the genre, Moray Dalton is one of the most under-rated crime authors of the ‘Golden Age’. Among the characters she created were the percipient and persistent private detective Hermann Glide and most popular of all, the young and woman-shy Scotland Yard inspector, Hugh Collier, who stared in a fifteen-book series. After living most of her life on the south coast of England, Katherine Renoir died in Worthing in 1963. PRAISE FOR MORAY DALTON ‘The author writes in an excellent, clear, vivid style’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Her mysteries [are] superbly readable examples of the fine art of English murder-fiction’ Curtis Evans ‘Commands the absorbed attention of the reader’ Boston Transcript ‘The mystery is well sustained’ New York Times

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