Publisher hunts for forgotten detective novelist Clifton Robbins
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Version 0 of 1. In a quest that calls for the detective skills of fictional sleuths from time past, a publisher has launched a search for the surviving relatives of a crime novelist whose novels have been out of print for almost 80 years. Clifton Robbins published nine novels between 1931 and 1940, five of which featured London barrister-turned-detective Clay Harrison. Scott Pack, co-founder and publisher at Canelo’s imprint Abandoned Bookshop, first discovered Robbins in a secondhand bookshop nearly 20 years ago, and said he had “spent almost as long trying to track down the author or his family”. Pack has just published the first two Clay Harrison novels, Dusty Death and The Man Without a Face, as ebooks, but says the publisher will keep aside royalties from the sale of the books in the hope that one of Robbins’s relatives comes forward to claim them. In the first, Harrison is investigating an apparent suicide in a London suburb and ends up on the trail of a drugs cartel. In the second, he and his clerk Henry witness a murder during a pageant at a stately home. “His novels, although very much of their time, are wonderful crime capers with a detective, in Clay Harrison, every bit as compelling as Lord Peter Wimsey or Paul Temple. I am sure modern readers will take to him, and his sidekick, Henry,” said Pack. Canelo co-founder Michael Bhaskar said that attempts to trace Robbins’s descendants had proved entirely fruitless so far. All the publisher knows is that the author appears to have been born in London in 1890, that he studied in Cambridge and that he worked as a journalist. None of his books were reprinted after 1940, and he published nothing new after that date. Some records suggest he died in 1944, others that he made it until 1964, but despite all of the publisher’s efforts, nothing else is known about the writer. “It’s a complete mystery who he is,” said Bhaskar. “Scott’s been in archives, he’s looked through newspapers from the time searching for notices of his death, he’s spoken to people all around the country, put notices up, but there’s been nothing. The trail has gone cold. It’s a very unusual situation - usually when a book is in copyright, it’s known who owns it. We’re hoping that opening this up to the general public will help us find a lead.” Canelo, a digital-only publisher, offers its authors a royalty starting at 50% of receipts. “Our royalties are more substantial than most … [they] will be there waiting if someone comes forward, and it will go on accruing if they don’t,” said Bhaskar. “As a publisher, we respect copyright and we want to do everything we can to find these people. Hopefully we’ll see someone come forward and say ‘this was my great-uncle’ or something.” Bhaskar compared Robbins’s writing to that of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, “but with more of an edge”. (“‘Drugs?’ ‘Yes, pounds of them. Enough to kill hundreds, sir,’” opens Dusty Death in Abandoned Bookshop’s new edition, which also features an appeal for information about Robbins or his family.) As for the author himself, “from his books, you get the sense that he might have been a bit of a character – there are a lot of dark shenanigans and drugs … he’s one of those people who exists on the fringes of the establishment, and flirts with the darker side as well,” said the publisher. |