Shadows Before: The London Mystery Stories of L. P. Davies, Volume 1 TPB

Trade paperback. Between December 1959 and May 1967 one of the most prolific and imaginative contributors to the long-running British fiction magazine London Mystery was the English author Leslie Purnell Davies (1914–1988). As well as writing under his regular byline L. P. Davies, the writer used many pseudonyms: Leo Berne, Richard Bridgeman, Morgan Evans, Ian Jefferson, Lawrence Peters, Thomas Philips, Leslie Vardre, G. K. Thomas, Rowland Welch and Robert Blake. And Davies’ stories were as varied as his pseudonyms_—_he tackled every genre that could fall under the magazine’s ‘mystery’ banner: crime, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. L. P. Davies had a remarkably fertile imagination and it’s no wonder that the prestigious London Mystery proved the main market for his short fiction. All the L. P. Davies stories published in London Mystery are collected over two volumes. Volume 1 contains a new introduction by editor David Balfour exploring Davies and his fiction followed by the first 38 stories published in London Mystery.