detective stories, two of which—Enter Sir John (1929) and Re-Enter Sir John (1932)—feature Sir John Saumarez, an actor-manager. They also co-wrote a stage play and the screenplay for Mary (1931), an atmospheric thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, whose film Murder! (1930) had been based on Enter Sir John. Simpson also wrote another crime novel, but without Dane. This was Vantage Striker (1931), described by one critic as ‘the jolliest murder case we’ve had for a long, long while’. Her next novel, Boomerang (1932), drew on the history of her mother’s family and won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Among Helen Simpson’s many hobbies was the study of witchcraft and demonology, which were the subject of the many rare books that formed the ‘Library of the Devil’ in her London home, where she also made her own wine. In 1932, she and her husband travelled to France and Hungary to research sightings of werewolves and vampires as well as to investigate the alleged involvement of satanists in the brutal murder of a typist in Strasbourg; Simpson would draw on this research for a radio talk, ‘On Witchcraft Bound’, which made headlines when it was first broadcast by the BBC in 1934 for its frank discussion of ritual murder. She also presented radio programmes for the BBC on homecraft and cookery, and she took part in several celebrity panel shows. Simpson also continued to write. Her other novels include The Woman on the Beast (1933), a long triptych fantasy set partly in 1999, as well as two historical novels: Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935), about the doomed romance between Sophie Dorothea of Celle and Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, and Under Capricorn (1937), about Australia’s early settlers. As well as the libertarian organisation PEN, Simpson was a member of the Detection Club and she contributed to two of the Club’s round-robin mysteries and to The Anatomy of Murder (1936), in which Dorothy L. Sayers and others explored notorious real-life crimes—in Simpson’s case, the murder of Henry Kinder in 1865.
In 1937, Helen Simpson embarked on a lecture tour of Australia and made various broadcasts for charity. In 1939, she was chosen as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party, but the General Election was postponed because of the Second World War. Her final novel, Maid No More, a strange story of slavery and Caribbean beliefs, was published in March 1940. At this time, Simpson and her husband were living in a flat above the hospital where her husband worked and, on 9 September 1940, the hospital was hit by a bomb during an air raid by the Luftwaffe; together with nursing staff and air raid wardens, they helped to extinguish the flames and move the sick children to safety. Just over a month later, the hospital where Simpson was recovering from a cancer operation was bombed and she died of shock. Her last literary assignment had been a series of articles giving a woman’s perspective of the war in response to views expressed by an American columnist.
‘Hotel Evidence’ was first published in Woman’s Journal in May 1934.
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