Shore (P.R., pseud. Helen Madeline Leys) The Death Film

London, Methuen, 1932.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.

An uncommon Golden Age detective novel, and a more intriguing one than its obscurity suggests. Though The Author’s & Writer’s Who’s Who records the author as one “Peter Redcliff Shore,” born Hampton 1892 and Oxford-educated, that persona appears to be a fiction: research has established the author as Helen Madeline Leys (1892-1965), daughter of the barrister-novelist John Kirkwood Leys and far better known under her other pen-name, Eleanor Scott.

A Somerville College graduate and teacher, Leys wrote mainstream novels and the didactic Adventurous Women and Heroic Women (1939), but her enduring reputation rests on the ghost-story collection Randalls Round (1929), comprising tales, several reportedly drawn from her own dreams, which have been likened to M.R. James.

The bibliographer & anthologist Richard Dalby, who reconstructed the few known facts of her life, ranked her among “the best, but ultimately least known, writers” of supernatural fiction of the era, and contemporary reviewers praised her uncanny grasp of feminine psychology.

The Death Film itself is one of very few Golden Age mysteries to set a murder in a cinema – a victim killed during a film screening – though the book is so seldom seen that little more about it has been recorded:

“…it is, apparently, an extremely scarce title and the only thing we know about it is that someone is killed during the screening of a movie. So that makes a grand total of… two cinema mysteries? Two and a half, if you count the one by Christie?” (Beneath the Stains of Time)

The other one and “a half” being One Remained Seated (John Slate [pseud. John Russell Fearn], 1946) and The ABC Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936) respectively. Genuinely scarce.