The Footsteps That Stopped: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery - Paperback

by A. E. Fielding (Author)

When the body of Mrs. Tangye was found sitting beside her tea-table with her service revolver, a souvenir of her days as an officer in the Waacs during the war, lying on the floor next to her and a bullet wound to the heart the initial assumption was that it was a case of an accident or suicide. There were no signs of a struggle or foul-play. Mrs. Tangye had been a strong willed woman more than capable of defending herself. And the fact was, she had acted in the days leading up to her death in a manner consistent with someone straightening up her affairs. But Chief Inspector Pointer was not so sure that Mrs. Tangye had died by her own hand, whether intentionally or by accident. There were several aspects of the case that troubled him, not least of which were the footsteps in the garden heard through the pantry window by the maid, footsteps that stopped when a light was turned on.

Author Biography

The identity of the author is as much a mystery as the plots of the novels. Two dozen novels were published from 1924 to 1944 as by Archibald Fielding, A. E. Fielding, or Archibald E. Fielding, yet the only clue as to the real author is a comment by the American publishers, H.C. Kinsey Co. that A. E. Fielding was in reality a "middle-aged English woman by the name of Dorothy Feilding whose peacetime address is Sheffield Terrace, Kensington, London, and who enjoys gardening." Research on the part of John Herrington has uncovered a person by that name living at 2 Sheffield Terrace from 1932-1936. She appears to have moved to Islington in 1937 after which she disappears. To complicate things, some have attributed the authorship to Lady Dorothy Mary Evelyn Moore nee Feilding (1889-1935), however, a grandson of Lady Dorothy denied any family knowledge of such authorship. The archivist at Collins, the British publisher, reports that any records of A. Fielding were presumably lost during WWII. Birthdates have been given variously as 1884, 1889, and 1900. Unless new information comes to light, it would appear that the real authorship must remain a mystery. Greg Fowlkes