Francis Quarles

Created by Julian Symons
(1912-1994)

Sharp-dressed man about town FRANCIS QUARLES was the low-key private detective who worked the clue-ridden streets of post-WWII London, solving countless cleverly plotted fair-play short stories in the fifties and sixties, paying homage to the Golden Age of crime fiction. Most of them first appeared in The London Evening Standard, although many subsequently popped up overseas in EQMM and other digests and several collections.

Quarles often hinted at some rather murky doings he’d had a hand in during “the war,” but he never got too specific. Still, no case was too big or too small for Quarles, who would dash out from his office in Trafalgar Square to see that justice was done, be it petty theft or murder.

The stories tended to be short and clever, the puzzles usually hanging on a single trick—but it was almost always a good trick.

The most recent collection, The Detections of Frances Quarles (2006), featured an introduction by editor John Cooper and an afterword by Symons’ widow, and collected 41 of the stories, including 21 previously uncollected investigations. Sadly, Quarles never appeared in a novel-length work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julian Symonds, of course, is generally considered one of the most distinguished British mystery writers to emerge after World War II, recognized with both the The Cartier Diamond Dagger, the Crime Writers Association‘s highest honor, and named as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. His short (but rarely slight) crime stories, mostly featuring Quarles, appeared in newspapers and magazines, but the prolific Symons also wrote full length mysteries, social, military and political histories, biographies, studies of crime and literature, and poetry. He leaned heavily left politically, although his definition of “progressive” kept evolving. He’s perhaps best known for Bloody Murder, one of the better known and more controversial works in the field of crime fiction criticism. Subtitled “From the detective story to the crime novel” it was as candid, opinionated and sometimes just plain cranky as Symons himself. An acknowledged classic of crime criticism, it was revised at least twice–in 1985 and 1992–but Symons strayed far from its central premise: that the classic puzzle mystery, associated with such writers as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr (and which Symons himself often wrote), somehow fell short of the more modern “crime novel,” which put emphasis on psychology and motivation. You can imagine how well that went over in some circles.

TRIVIER AND TRIVIER

• Not to be outdone by Marlowe and Spenser, Francis Quarles was named for the English poet (1592-1644), who was best known for Emblems.

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

• “Affection Unlimited” (July 10, 1950, The London Evening Standard)
• “Mrs. Rolleston’s Diamonds” (August 10, 1950, The London Evening Standard)
• “Happy Hexing” (September 19, 1950, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Desk” (September 29, 1950, The London Evening Standard)
• “Who Killed Harrington?” (November 28, 1950, The London Evening Standard)
• “Death in the Scillies” (March 13, 1951, The London Evening Standard)
• “Ghost from the Past” (October 1, 1951, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Case of XX-2” (1951; August 1952, EQMM)
• “The Pepoli Case” (February 2, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Red Rum Means Murder” (May 15, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Whistling Man” (July 9, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Vanishing Trick” (July 28, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “An Exercise in Logic” (September 8, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Poison Pen” (September 15, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Preserving the Evidence” (September 18, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Nothing Up His Sleeve” (September 23, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Double Double Cross” (September 25, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “Death for Mr. Golightly” (December 22, 1952, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Clue in the Book” (May 5, 1952, The London Evening Standard; also 2022, Murder by the Book)
• “The Duke of York” (January 27, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Conjuring Trick” (January 28, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “No Deception” (January 29, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Link” (January 30, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “A Man with Blue Hair” (January 31, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Two Suitors” (September 15, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “Tattoo” (September 16, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “Jack and Jill” (September 19, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “Iced Champagne” (October 19, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Swedish Nightingale” (September 14, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “Summer Show” (August 21, 1954, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Collector” (September 18, 1953, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Barton Hall Dwarf” (August 16, 1954, The London Evening Standard)
• “Little Boy Blue” (August 20, 1954, The London Evening Standard)
• “A Present from Santa Claus” (December 24, 1954 The London Evening Standard)
• “Final Night Extra” (September 3, 1955, The London Evening Standard)
• “Airborne with a Borgia” (September 28, 1955, The London Evening Standard)
• “Murder—But How Was It Done?” (October 29, 1956, The London Evening Standard)
• “Party Line” (October 30, 1956, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Second Bullet” (October 31, 1956, The London Evening Standard)
• “Murder in Reverse” (November 2, 1956, The London Evening Standard)
• “Ancestor Worship” (November 3, 1956, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Grand National Case” (1956; AKA “Murder on the Race Course”)
• “Strolling in the Square One Day” (1960; 1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “The Santa Claus Club (December 1960, Suspense [UK]; 1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Centre Court Mystery” (1961)
• “Credit to Shakespeare” (1961; aka “Credit to William Shakespeare”)
• “The Hiding Place” (1961)
• “A Pearl Among Women” (1961)
• “Time for Murder” (1961)
• “Art-Loving Mr. Lister Lands a Fake…” (March 13, 1963, The London Evening Standard)
• “No Use Turning a Deaf Ear to Murder” (June 1, 1964, The London Evening Standard)
• “The Impossible Theft” (1964)
• “Thirty Days Hath September” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Ace of Spades” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “The Archer” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Blue Paint” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “By the Sea” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “The Case of the Frightened Promote” (London Evening Standard; 1965)
• “Coffin for Three” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Four Letters” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Hot Summer Night” (Argosy [UK]; 1965; 1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “Kidnap Plot” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “A Matter of Opportunity” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “One Little Letter” (1965, Francis Quarles Investigates)
• “How to Trap a Crook” (1972)
• “Hot Summer Night” (Argosy [UK]; 1975, John Creasey’s Mystery Bedside Book)
• “Airport Incident”
• “Comedy in Venice”
• “Each Man Kills”
• “The Invisible Poison”
• “Little Man Lost”
• “Meeting in the Snow”
• “The Absent-Minded Professor”
• “Out of the Mouths”
• “Picture Show”
• “The Plaster Pekinese”
• “Sailor’s Hornpipe”
• “Test Match Murder”
• “The Unhappy Piano Tuner”
• “The Woman Afraid of October”
• The Wrong Hat”

COLLECTIONS

• Murder! Murder! (1961)
• Francis Quarles Investigates (1965)
• The Detections of Frances Quarles (2006) | Buy this book

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.