At the time, the only Heyer short stories I had seen were the eleven historical tales that made up the 1960 anthology, Pistols for Two – republished in 2016 under the title Snowdrift, and including three more historical shorts I was able to unearth – all of which had been published from 1935 onwards. However, here among the collection of her correspondence owned by the University of Tulsa was a letter in Heyer’s own hand, written to her agent just a few months after her twentieth birthday, that said: “I’ve sent you another short story, and there is a third in the making.” I was instantly intrigued. While I knew it was possible that these early short stories, sent so enthusiastically to her agent, might never have been published, I also knew that I had to find out.

The first challenge was working out where these early Heyer stories might have appeared. This was no easy task as the 1920s in England had been a Golden Age for short story writers with more fiction magazines published than at any other time. Scores of famous writers made their names writing for publications such as The Strand Magazine, Nash’s, The Happy Mag, Sovereign, The Quiver, Pall Mall, The Red Magazine and Pearson’s, among many others. Writers like Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton, J.B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier, A.A. Milne, Sapper, and Ngaio Marsh found homes for their short fiction on a regular basis. As Mike Ashley observed in The Age of Storytellers, the 1920s would also be “the last haven of the popular fiction magazine” as the rise of radio in the 1930s saw the demand for short stories begin to decline.

If Georgette Heyer had been published in one or more of these magazines, I reasoned, then it seemed likely that these would have been historical stories. Unfortunately, this gave me no real idea of which among dozens of likely magazines might have accepted her youthful tales. Fortunately, as I read through the archive of her letters I came across a clue. In 1936, Heyer had written two historical shorts and she wrote to her agent about them: “under no circumstances should they be offered to the cheap ‘popular’ magazines such as The Red & The Happy, etc.” Here at last was a clue to at least a couple of magazines where I could start looking.

The biggest repository of UK magazines in the world is the British Library, and so I returned to that great institution and began my search for these forgotten Heyer works. One hundred and sixty microfilm reels later, I had found five short stories: three in The Happy Mag and two in the Red Magazine. It was an exhilarating experience. There is nothing like that moment when, after pages and pages and pages have been examined, suddenly – there in front of you – is Georgette Heyer’s name and above it the title of a story you have never heard of before. And then comes the thrill of reading for the first time the stories written when she was only twenty. I devoured “A Proposal to Cicely” (which was, I later discovered, republished in Mary Fahnestock-Thomas’s Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective in 2001), “The Little Lady”, “The Bulldog and the Beast”, “Acting on Impulse” and “Whose Fault Was It?”. Five short stories, all set in contemporary times and each with something new to tell me about Heyer.