"The Most Hated Man in London" by Patricia Moyes (first published in The Evening Standard, March 16, 1963, as "Murder! -- With Five Bob's Worth of Human Misery"; reprinted thereafter under the present title in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March 10, 1980; in London After Midnight, edited by Peter Haining, 1966; in Moyes' collection Who Killed Father Christmas?, 1996; and in Metropolitan Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards, 2024)
There was a time when many British newspapers published fiction, both original and reprinted, among them The Evening Standard of London. Brief stories, to be sure, and many of those that were reprints were abridged. The Evening Standard, a daily, began in 1859 as a sister publication to The Standard (which folded in 1916); it is still being published, but, alas, evidently with no fiction -- according to the FictionMags Index, the latest date the paper published fiction was in 1999. The earliest piece of fiction published in the paper was the serial "Dear Acquaintance" by Rosemary Rees with installments six times a week through at least the entire month of January, 1929; daily offering of short fiction (at least according to the FMI) began in 1932 with reprints from Holloway Horn, Arthur Morrison, Barry Pain, Frank R. Stockton, James Stephens, H. G. Wells, H. E. Bates and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. Original stories began appearing sporadically and increasing in 1933. There were long periods of months, and even years, in which the paper published no fiction, possibly due to a change in editorial tastes or to perceived customer reaction, but through the 40's 50's, and the early 60's, the fiction kept bouncing back. The last piece of fiction mentioned in the FMI was "A Giant's Robe Upon a Dwarfish Thief" by Michael Innes (December 28, 1964). It should be noted that the newspaper published at least four doorstop anthologies in the 1930s -- two of general short stories and two of "Strange Tales"; this was followed by two volumes of detective stories in the early 1950s.
Patricia Moyes (1923-2000) was a British mystery writer best known for her 19 novels about C.I.D. Inspector Henry Tibbett and his beloved wife, Emmy. She served as the personal assistant for actor Peter Ustinov for eight years, co-wrote the 1960 filmscript for School for Scandal, and translated the 1940 Jean Anouilh's play Leocadia as Time Remembered (which received several Tony Awards for is Broadway production with Richard Burton, Helen Hayes, and Susan Strasberg). Over her career, Moyes wrote about twenty short stories, about half of them for the British newspapers in the early 1960s; by necessity most of them were very short.
"The Most Hated Man in London" is a brief puzzle story. The title character is Max Scotland, a disreputable moneylender and blackmailer who enjoyed squeezing out every bob he could from his victims. Max conducted all his business from his office, which was guarded by a gatekeeper -- a very reliable "old soldier" named Potts -- there was no way to go in or out of Max's office without being seen by him. Max Scotland kept scrupulous records, as well as an appointment diary. His diary for that recorded three appointments. The last person with an appointment claimed that he went in to discover Max's body, his opened safe, and burned papers, and raised the alarm. The second person claimed she also found the body, panicked, and left the scene immediately, leaving a blood-stained footprint. That left the suspicion to fall on the first appointment. But did he do it? By paying attention to each of the statement from the three suspects and the guard, the unnamed Chief Inspector who was called to the case was able to immediately discover the culprit.
A minor story, five pages long, with a conclusion most readers should have worked out, but probably didn't. Clever, but not earth-shattering. Entertaining, but slight. To read Moyes at her full powers, read any of the Henry Tibbett mysteries. You will be glad you did.
