The High Sheriff

The High Sheriff

First edition (UK)
Author	Henry Wade
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Detective
Publisher	Constable
Publication date	1937
Media type	Print

The High Sheriff is a 1937 mystery detective novel by the British writer Henry Wade.^[1] Wade was a writer of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, best known for his series featuring Inspector Poole.^[2] This was one of a number of stand-alone novels he wrote, structured as a partially inverted detective story.

Reception[]

Cecil Day-Lewis writing in The Spectator under his pen name Nicholas Blake noted in his review that the author "turns from pure detection to the novel of character with a crime motif. The turn, to my mind, is not for the better: but that may be because I don’t care for hunting and shooting, which play a large part in the book, and because I found the hero, Sir Robert D’Arcy, rather a stick." A more favourable review was written by Sir Claud Schuster in the Times Literary Supplement.

Synopsis[]

Sir Robert D’Arcy, the high sheriff of Brackenshire is blackmailed by a man who knows of his act of cowardice against the Germans during the First World War. D’Arcy, a proud and arrogant man from a leading family of the county can't bear the potential slur against his name. When the blackmailer is shot dead during a shooting party at D’Arcy's country house, suspicion inevitably falls on him.

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Magill, Frank Northen . Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction: Authors, Volume 4. Salem Press, 1988.
• Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.

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