The Case of the Missing Diary: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery

A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery

Charles Dawnay was a devoted husband, a loving father, and an honest and successful man of business. His one quirk, if it could be called that, was that he kept a meticulous diary in which he noted every appointment and encounter both past and future. Therefore, when his body was found with its head bashed in, the police had every hope that the diary might provide a clue as to who the last person to see him alive might be, as that person might well prove to be the murderer. However, when the diary is examined, it proves to be written in an indecipherable code. When Chief Inspector Pointer is called in to handle the case, he quickly determines that the diary found on the body is not the one kept by the murdered man, but a substitute. The search is on for the real diary, for only its recovery will allow Pointer to solve . . . The Case of the Missing Diary

The identity of the author is as much a mystery as the plots of the novels. Two dozen novels were published from 1924 to 1944 as by Archibald Fielding, A. E. Fielding, or Archibald E. Fielding, yet the only clue as to the real author is a comment by the American publishers, H.C. Kinsey Co. that A. E. Fielding was in reality a "middle-aged English woman by the name of Dorothy Feilding whose peacetime address is Sheffield Terrace, Kensington, London, and who enjoys gardening." Research on the part of John Herrington has uncovered a person by that name living at 2 Sheffield Terrace from 1932-1936. She appears to have moved to Islington in 1937 after which she disappears. To complicate things, some have attributed the authorship to Lady Dorothy Mary Evelyn Moore nee Feilding (1889-1935), however, a grandson of Lady Dorothy denied any family knowledge of such authorship. The archivist at Collins, the British publisher, reports that any records of A. Fielding were presumably lost during WWII. Birthdates have been given variously as 1884, 1889, and 1900. Unless new information comes to light, it would appear that the real authorship must remain a mystery.