Measure for Murder

Clifford Witting

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English

Galileo Publishers
01 May 2022

Fiction & Literature; Crime & Mystery

3RD IN GALILEO'S REISSUE SERIES OF WITTING'S CLASSIC ENGLISH DETECTIVE STORIES.

It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure.

The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting's series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder....

But can the police disentangle the complicated relationships to discover the real killer?

It seems that this story had its roots in a real live production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604), which Witting saw in May 1939. at the Bromley Little Theatre in Kent. First published in 1941, it was the fifth of Witting's novels which were written over a period of 30 years and excels both in the plot but also, and notably in his extraordinary characterisation skills. The author died in 1968 having completed 12 books.

This is the third of Galileo's reissues of Witting's oeuvre. The first, published October 2021, Catt out of the Bag, was received with great enthusiasm by Golden Age crime fiction fans and is already in its third printing (as of March 2021). The second, Murder in Blue will also be published during Autumn 2021.

AUTHOR: Clifford Witting (1907-68) was an English writer who was educated at Eltham College, London, between 1916 and 1924. During World War II he served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery, 1942-44, and as a Warrant Officer in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, 1944-46. His first novel Murder in Blue was published in 1937 and his series characters were Sergeant (later Inspector) Peter Bradford and Inspector Harry Charlton. Unusually, he didn't join The Detection Club until 1958 by which time he had written 12 detective novels.

By: Clifford Witting
Imprint: Galileo Publishers
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781912916528
ISBN 10: 1912916525
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 01 May 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

This is one of 16 novels that Clifford Witting put out with Hodder & Stoughton between 1937 and 1964. He died in 1968. Witting is now very collectible and is seen as one of the leading detective story writers of the pre-war and immediate post war period.