The Bells at Old Bailey

It was not until the fifth death in Long Greeting that Miss Tidy made up her mind to go to the police.
It was not a sense of civic duty that compelled her, but the arrival of two letters that made it clear her life was in danger. The local villagers had been agitated for months over whether the seemingly unconnected deaths were the suicides they appeared to be. Better to say nothing of her intentions though, not even to her immediate circle: the staff of the Minerva hat shop who worked for her, or Léonie, her old Breton maid. Nor would she mention the letters to her interested neighbours or the rector, who had buried four of the victims, or even to Owen Greatorex, the novelist of international reputation, who seemed disarmingly gentle. For who was to be trusted?
Scotland Yard is soon on the scene but more deaths occur before Detective-Inspector Raikes puts the pieces together.
Dorothy Bowers (1902-48) was a champion of "fair play" mysteries, in which all the clues are cunningly displayed within the story. The Bells at Old Bailey (1947) was her fifth and last novel. Bowers died in 1948 from tuberculosis, having been inducted the prestigious Detection Club a few months earlier.

Dorothy Violet Bowers (1902-1948) was born in Leominster, the daughter of a confectioner. The family moved to Monmouth in 1903 where her father ran his own bakery until he retired in 1936. Educated at the Monmouth High School for Girls, Bowers received a scholarship for Oxford and, displaying the dogged tenacity evident throughout her short life, sat the Latin entrance exam three times before she was finally accepted. Women had only recently been able to get degrees at Oxford and Bower's sister Evelyn also joined her there, which suggests a familial focus on education. In 1926, Bowers graduated from the Society of Oxford Home-Students (now St Anne's College) with a third class honours degree in Modern History, and spent the next few years pursuing a career as a history teacher. Subsequent letters to her college principal documented her worries about family finances ("my father....our university careers have been a heavy expense to him.") and her desire to break away from Monmouth ("I have a dread of finding work in a small pleasant county-town such as this. The temptation to crystallize would be too great.") Temporary jobs teaching history and English did not inspire her and she turned to writing; letters to friends documented the slow, uphill battle to get published. During this time, she supplemented her income by compiling crossword puzzles for John O'London Weekly under the pseudonym "Daedalus".
Bowers published four Inspector Pardoe novels in rapid succession: Postscript to Poison (1938), Shadows Before (1939), Deed without a Name (1940) and Fear For Miss Betony (1941). Fear For Miss Betony was heralded by the Times of London as the best mystery of 1941, stating "Every page bears witness to a brain of uncommon powers". The outbreak of war brought Bowers to London, where she worked in the European News Service of the BBC. Her final book, The Bells at Old Bailey, was published in 1947, with Pardoe replaced by another Scotland Yard detective, Raikes. Never of robust health, Bowers contracted tuberculosis during this period and eventually succumbed to the disease in August, 1948. She died knowing that she had been inducted into the prestigious Detection Club, the only writer selected for membership in 1948.