I’ve somehow managed to get this far into the Golden Age without reading any Francis Beeding, the nom de plume jointly adopted by John Palmer and Hilary St. George Saunders, but then it’s only a recent spate of Merlin Classic Crime ebook publications which has made them accessible. So let’s start our acquaintanceship off with The Norwich Victims (1932), one of Beeding’s 30-some novels — an inverted mystery that has been highly praised in many other quarters in the GAD fandom. And I can see why: it’s a genuine inverted tale, for one, and contains some clever ideas that wring much from the apparently uninspiring setup…a staunch lesson to anyone who thinks that knowing the murderer early on in some way hamstrings a mystery plot.