[Pulpmeister]

In my tireless scrounging for short stories from newspapers and the like, for the L+70 Past Masters series, I occasionally turn up something that is very odd indeed.

Such as my latest discovery, a tough murder story set in the outback of Western Australia in (by the context) the interwar years, attributed to... wait for it ... E M Delafield.

It turned up in a Hobart Weekly called The Voice, 29 March 1952.

Now it's plainly not by E M Delafield, but by someone who knows the country out beyond Kalgoorlie where, it is very safe to say, E M Delafield never went. I was born in Kalgoorlie, and the countryside out there is known to me, and the story's got it all spot on.

It was published in 1952 so even if it's truly anonymous, it's still in copyright in L+70. I've parked it away under "Curiosities", like a previous discovery of a British crime short story as by "James Hilton", quite unlike his style and not known to the Hilton experts.