Mystery and Crime Heming, John Winton: The Duke Returns (1938), v1, 26 Feb 2024

[Pulpmeister]

John Winton Heming, 1900-1953

Heming was a compulsive writer of plays, short stories, novels and non-fiction, and managed to make a rather sparse living at it in depression era Australia. During WW2, imports of all non-essentials ceased, and that included magazines and books. Heming, like a number of other Australian writers, filled this yawning gap by churning out hundreds of Western, Romance, Science Fiction, Crime, and other genre stories and novels under numerous pseudonyms. Westerns, for example, were by Tex Barton...

This is one of two known crime novels featuring gentleman crook "The Duke" and his colorful enemies and friends in the underworld, and appeared as a magazine serial in 1938. The other is "The Duke Cleans Up", similarly a serial, in 1936. Neither seems to have been published in book form.

I created the cover using a detail from an early 1930s smart clothing catalogue image.

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