In 1937, Rowland married a nurse from Yorkshire, Gertrude Adams. When the Second World War started, he was conscripted into the scientific civil service instead of the armed forces, because he had a degree in chemistry. He worked in the management of armaments factories, initially at Woolwich Arsenal and later at various places around the country (including Thorp Arch, on the site of which the British Library’s branch at Boston Spa now stands). The Rowlands’ only child was born in 1944, and given one of Gawsworth’s middle names, Fytton.

After the war ended, Rowland resumed working for Watts, and publishing detective stories. By 1950 he felt secure enough to resign from his day job, becoming a freelance writer. The family moved to Leeds, where they stayed for two years. In Leeds, however, Rowland’s religious views underwent a fundamental change. Influenced by a Unitarian minister called Reginald Wilde, he abandoned humanism, and became a Unitarian. Not content with that, he resolved to become a Unitarian minister himself, and in 1952 he was appointed lay pastor in charge of the Unitarian church in Brighton. For several years he commuted from Brighton to attend Manchester College, Oxford, to train for the ministry. During this period he had little time to spare for writing, although after qualifying as a minister, he started writing again.

Reading tastes had changed, however, and Rowland was unable to find a market for detective stories of the kind he preferred. He decided to concentrate on non-fiction, and specifically on criminology and biographies of scientists and technologists aimed at teenagers. He also became the editor of a magazine called The Unitarian. His output declined gradually in quantity, but right up to his death he was a “stringer” covering the village in which he lived for the local weekly newspaper. He always gave his profession as “journalist” rather than “writer”.

Gertrude died in 1967, and Rowland later married Marguerite Miller, a widowed member of his congregation. His final church was in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and he retired to Somerset, dying in 1984 at the age of 76. By that time, his detective novels had been forgotten, but thanks to the British Library’s Crime Classics series, readers now have the opportunity to rediscover them.

Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com

Chapter I

Chapter I

Death!

Beneath the high, gloomy dome, Henry Fairhurst looked around him. There was an air of deathly stillness in the place, and a silence broken only by the occasional rustle of pages and the subdued murmur of a borrower discussing books with an official. The British Museum Reading Room is a strange place, and Henry Fairhurst had not been within its privileged precincts for many a long day, but he had now managed to get hold of some literary research on behalf of an enterprising journalist who was contemplating the writing of a life of an obscure French courtesan in the seventeenth century.