I don’t know that these books are forgotten as much as no one seems to have heard of them to begin with. After working as an editor at Chatto and Windus, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Michael O’Mara Books for several years, David Roberts became a full-time writer, best known for a series of 10 crime novels set during the late 1930s, featuring the adventures of Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. The novels use actual historical events as a backdrop and there is an Author’s Note at the end briefly outlining what happened to the nonfiction characters.
Dangerous Sea (Carroll & Graf, 2003) is the fourth book in the series. Lord Corinth is the second son of a duke and Verity is a committed Communist and journalist for left-wing publications. Set amid the political mayhem of the 1930s, this book highlights the growing but unacknowledged attraction of the two, who recognize their very different philosophies of life can only doom the budding relationship. That doesn’t stop them from embarking on adventures together: the two recently returned from retrieving Corinth’s teenage nephew who ran away from school to fight in the Spanish Civil War at Verity’s unwitting instigation.
In the first pages of this book Corinth is approached by someone well-placed in the British government to accompany an eminent economist on a trip to the United States, where the economist will take part publicly in conferences and privately plead with the President for his financial assistance to England in the war everyone sees coming. Security officials believe the economist is in danger from German agents who are aware of his mission, so Corinth enlists Verity and his nephew, who is refusing to return to school, to assist in seeing that the economist is never alone. Everyone is excited about a trip to the United States aboard the great ship Queen Mary, including avowed Communist Verity, who has pangs of guilt about traveling in First Class luxury. Within a day of embarkation the body of the guard assigned officially to protect the economist is found, obviously murdered, and the search for the killer begins.
While an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic has little in common with a country manor house full of snowed-in guests, the two are quite similar when a murder occurs. The assassin perforce is unable to leave and there is a finite pool of potential candidates from which to pull the culprit. The story makes the most of the diverse personalities onboard but the guard’s killer was more or less obvious early on. The motive was the only element not immediately apparent. The weak mystery in no way affects the story, which has compelling characters, interesting subplots, and an authoritative description of life on a passenger cruise ship.
The strong similarity of Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne to Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane has been noted repeatedly. It is so strong it has to be deliberate. It is interesting that Roberts decided to set the story some 10 years after the launch of the Wimsey/Vane partnership. The 1930s was a time of great economic and political volatility and events provide a substantial basis for a historical fiction series. These books remind me of the Rowland Sinclair books by Sulari Gentill, as they both capture the precarious nature of the time.
See a plot summary of all 10 books with review comments here: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/roberts-david-1944