Created by M.V. Heberden
Pseudonyms include Charles L. Leonard
(1906-65)
“There are very few moments when the truth is a good idea.”
— Rick Vanner
Female author Mary Violet Heberden, hiding behind her initials, was one of the few women mentioned in mystery critic James Sandoe‘s oft-reprinted and anthologized personal checklist of favorite Hard-boiled Dicks. No slouch, she also created private eye, Desmond Shannon, and a sorta private eye/spy, Paul Kerrigan, under the pen name of Charles L. Leonard.
She also wrote three books featuring cynical and skeptical former Naval Intelligence Commander RICK VANNER who turned to private investigation after his service because it paid better. But he didn’t stray far from his own turf — most of his primary clients were government contractors, and he specialized in “foreign affairs.”
Then he stepped out of that life, ostensibly to retire. But he was pulled back in his debut, Murder Cancels All Debts (1946).
It’s a nice piece of work, and Heberden dished up plenty of private eye action in these three books, even having Vanner journeying as far as Buenos Aires in Engaged to Murder (1949), while the author’s sharp-eyed criticism of an evolving post-war America (especially in the first book) still struggling to define itself cut through much of the patriotic rah-rah of the time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M.V. Heberden began her life as an actress in England, before emigrating to the US where she landed a variety of supporting parts in Broadway productions. It was during this period that she began writing detective novels. Her first novel, a theatrical mystery featuring Desmond Shannon, was Death on the Door Mat, published in 1939. A successful businesswoman, she had a fondness for travel and lived and worked in South America, running a timber company in Brazil, and settled in Rome for a while in the 1950s. Her 20-year writing career may have never been her primary source of income, but she certainly churned them out, sometimes as many as four books a year. Her final novel was published in 1953. She died in 1965.
Unfortunately, despite the critical and popular success received in their time (Anthony Boucher, for example, was a big fan, routinely praising Heberden’s work), very few of her books have been reissued, and paperback editions published during her lifetime are few and far between, which may explain Heberden’s relative obscurity. Still, the used book market is flooded with a variety of her titles, in both US and UK editions.
NOVELS
- Murder Cancels All Debts (1946) | Buy this book
- Engaged to Murder (1949) | Buy this book
- The Sleeping Witness (1951) | Buy this book
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
