Anthony Berkeley

English · 1893 to 1971

Born Anthony Berkeley Cox on July 5, 1893, in Watford, Hertfordshire, he was the son of a country doctor and grew up in comfortable English circumstances. He was educated at Sherborne School and read classics at University College, Oxford, before the First World War interrupted everything. He served in France, where he was gassed, an injury that troubled his health for the rest of his life. After the war he turned to writing, beginning with humorous sketches for Punch before finding his true vocation in detective fiction. His early novels appeared anonymously, then under the name Anthony Berkeley, opening with The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and introducing the amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham, a deliberately fallible detective who often got the solution wrong. The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) became his most celebrated puzzle, a single murder solved six different ways by six members of a crime circle, each answer plausible and each but one mistaken. In 1930 he founded the Detection Club, gathering Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and others under a half-serious oath against unfair clueing. Under a second pen name, Francis Iles, he turned from the puzzle toward the psychology of the murderer, writing Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932), the latter filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Suspicion. He largely stopped writing fiction in the late 1930s, settling into work as a reviewer and living quietly, reportedly cantankerous and reclusive in his later years. He died on March 9, 1971, in London, at the age of seventy-seven, his identity behind the Iles novels confirmed publicly only near the end.