Happy belated birthday, Rupert Croft-Cooke.

I missed on Friday the birthday of British poet-playwright-writer-critic Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-79), the creator (under the name Leo Bruce) of placid and unerring detective Sergeant Beef and history teacher-sleuth Carolus Deene. Academy Chicago Publishers has reprinted some of the Beef and Deene works, including the classic The Case for Three Detectives (1936), in which Beef squares off against investigators clearly modeled on Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Christie's Poirot, and Chesterton's Father Brown in a locked-room mystery.

Here is an earlier discussion I posted on Croft-Cooke's work.