Charles Kingston O’Mahony (c. 1884-1944) was born in Ireland and worked as a journalist and author in England during the 1920s and 1930s. Under the name Charles Kingston, he wrote crime fiction, including seven books about Detective Chief Inspector Wake of Scotland Yard. He also produced a number of collections of true crime stories, famous legal cases, and stories of judges. A number of these books are available on the Hathitrust website: https://www.hathitrust.org/ Among his nonfiction works are a history of the viceroys of Ireland; an analysis of Morganatic marriages; and stories of Monte Carlo.
Kingston published some two dozen mysteries across as many years, beginning in 1921. For a full list of first edition titles and publishers, see Classic Crime Fiction, http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/charles-kingston.htm
The first book with DCI Wake is Murder in Piccadilly (Ward Lock, 1936) which was reprinted as part of the British Library Crime Classics Library in 2015. Bobbie Cheldon has been raised by his indulgent widowed mother to believe he is too special to earn his own living and he should look forward to inheriting the Cheldon land and money when his uncle dies. The uncle is far from superannuated and is annoyed with Bobbie’s undisguised greed.
Bobbie lives frivolously and well beyond his means. He has taken up with a nightclub dancer who wants to marry and retire. Bobbie is in love with Nancy and Nancy is in love with his expected inheritance. Nancy’s unsavory friends are also interested in his inheritance and a couple of them are not above taking steps to hasten it.
The uncle is dispatched on a subway platform via an Italian dagger and DCI Wake comes into the story. Wake sizes up the players and the likely culprit quickly but building a solid case is another matter. A plot twist near the end comes from a completely unexpected source to give this largely predictable story some much needed buzz.
As Martin Edwards points out in his introduction to the British Library reprint, intergenerational conflicts over inheritances and money are nothing new. They are a common motive for murder in crime fiction of the early 20th century. Kingston does seem to know a good deal about the London underworld and its denizens, and he’s good at portraying them on the page. As Mysteries Ahoy notes in his review, the characters are not attractive people but they do strike the reader as genuine. See https://mysteriesahoy.com/2018/09/07/murder-in-piccadilly-by-charles-kingston/
See also Window Through Time, https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/murder-in-piccadilly/ and the Sunday Book Club on The Phoenix Remix, https://thephoenixremix.com/2023/12/10/sunday-book-club-murder-in-piccadilly-charles-kingston/