Leonard Alfred Knight (1895-1977) is another of those crime fiction authors who was popular for awhile and then disappeared as reading tastes changed. Knight was born in Burpham, Sussex, on 3 January 1895. His parents were Arthur and Harriett Knight, and he had a younger brother named Arthur. He was baptized on 10 March 1895 in Burpham Parish of Sussex by the vicar, Robert Foster. He was living as a boarder in St. Mary, Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the 1921 Wales census and working as a traveling sales representative for a London tea firm. He married Olive Hamilton Trew on 2 September 1926 in Haverfordwest, St Thomas, Pembrokeshire, where Olive was living. His residence is listed on the marriage registry as Bridgend, a town in the historical county of Glamorgan, Wales. He gave his occupation at the time as superintendent for B. P. Company, which seems to be the British Petroleum Company. The Welshman, 18 November 1938, said that Knight was on the staff of Shell-Mex and B. P. Ltd. He died 16 December 1977 in Haverfordwest, where he is buried in the City Road Cemetery. Olive joined him there in 1988. (Sources: English and Wales census, marriage, and death records)
The Western Mail of 17 September 1930 helpfully stated that Knight was in the 9th Battalion East Surreys during World War I, along with British novelist and poet Gilbert Frankau and British playwright and screenwriter R. F. Sherriff.
Knight published 32 books between 1930 and 1956, 14 of them from 1930 through 1939. He is the creator of Jerry Scant, a gypsy and amateur sleuth in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where he set many of his books. The Welshman, 18 November 1938, quoted Knight as saying that he first wrote short stories and then began longer works. He has an entry in The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales.
His first book was Deadman’s Bay, first released in 1930 by Sampson Low, who published most of his work. Set in Pembrokeshire, it is a thriller rather than a mystery. The story is very much of its time. A semi-retired member of England’s intelligence department named Warren is asked to look into drug smuggling along the coast of Wales. The villain is identified early and he is appropriately despicable. Gypsy, poacher, and all-round handyman Jerry Scant rescues Warren from almost certain death and stays to help ensnare the evil-doers. The frontispiece is a well-drawn and helpful map.
The plot is woefully thin. Warren is predictable as is the crook, but some of the supporting characters are terrific: Jerry Scant for one and two neighbors that Scant enlists for the cause, a pair of brothers, both named David Jonathan. The younger one is known as Jonathan-bach to differentiate him from his older brother. (Those of a certain age will remember The Bob Newhart Show with Larry and his brothers Darryl and Darryl.)
Also of the time are the sweeping racial epithets. No one escapes: Asian, African, Mediterranean, and Latin, all of them are disparaged in language considered unacceptable today. And of course the mysterious poison from Africa only known to a few plays a key part.
What struck me as exceptional is Knight’s gift for description. Like E.C.R. Lorac, he clearly loved nature and the paragraphs I found enchanting all vividly depicted the setting:
The low walls on each side of the road flowed past us like undulating ribbons, the moon lighting up the grey stones with ghost-like glimmer. Stunted trees loomed up in the distance, were passed and dropped away behind. Presently, as we neared the bottom, the wall gave place to high, thick hedges, covered with sweet-scented honeysuckle. Rustling sycamores cast thick black shadows athwart the road, and in this darkness the fluttering bats darted up and down long tree-sheltered tunnels.
The coastline and the mountains as well as a cave known to be a haunt of the Druids also received Knight’s eloquent attention.
The Times Literary Supplement favorably reviewed the first three books by Knight, who sometimes published under Leonard A. Knight and sometimes under L. A. Knight. Knight’s publishers consistently included his latest title in their display ads, which suggests that he was a reliable moneymaker. A media scan shows Knight’s books were often reviewed in the 1930s regional UK newspapers and his name appeared along Agatha Christie’s more than once. However, his name largely dropped off the radar after the beginning of the second war even though he continued to publish for another 15 years. TLS ran a review of The Morlo, Knight’s last book, on 8 February 1957.
Deadman’s Bay was one of the three titles Dr. Catherine Phelps (https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/phelpsc3) chose to illustrate her points throughout her thesis entitled [Dis]solving Genres: Arguing the Case for Welsh Crime Fiction researched and presented to meet the requirements for her Ph.D. at Cardiff University. The list of references is comprehensive and intriguing. https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/60053/1/C.%20Phelps%20Final%20thesis.pdf
Hopefully Knight developed some skill in plotting in his later books. I intend to find a few more to see if they improved. While they likely were never more than solidly midlist fiction, his name should be a bit better known in crime fiction circles than it is. Too, there are so few instances of crime fiction set in Wales that any titles are of note. This glimpse of Wales in the late 1920s will be of especial interest to social historians and students of Golden Age thrillers and mysteries.
The Daily Telegraph,18, September 1931, ·Page 5, offers a trio of reviews by journalist, poet, and novelist E. C. Bentley.
