C. H. B. Kitchin

Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in 1895. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, from where he won a classical scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford. From 1916-1918 he served in the British Army in France, and after the war turned to the law, joining Lincoln's Inn and being called to the bar in 1924. Later, like the hero of his crime novels, Malcolm Warren, he became a stockbroker, but a huge inherited fortune allowed him to leave his profession and to concentrate on his great love, writing.

His first two novels, Streamers Waving and Mr Balcony, were published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press in 1924 and 1925, and he won wide popularity with his first detective novel, Death of My Aunt (1929). Over the years, more crime fiction appeared: Crime at Christmas (1934), Death of His Uncle (1939) and The Cornish Fox (1949), interspersed with more serious novels, the most famous of which is The Auction Sale (1949).

The unique atmosphere of Kitchin's detective fiction owes a lot to his own eccentricity. Scholarly, humorous, given to sudden caprices, he was an expert botanist, poet, linguist, fine chess player and talented musician, with the unnerving habit of composing improvisations to illustrate his friends' characters. An avid collector of priceless objects, whether Georgian silver or Meissen teapots, he was also well known as a gambler on London greyhound tracks and in Riviera casinos. In the end, however, despite his daunting, rapier wit, his death in 1967 drew tributes to, above all, his sensitivity and generosity of spirit.

Biography from The Hogarth Press