John Palmer

John Leslie Palmer was an English author and theatre critic, born in Paddington, London, on September 4, 1885, and died in Hampstead on August 5, 1944. Under his own name, he wrote widely about early English actors and British literary figures, building a reputation as a sharp, well-read commentator on the stage and on literary history.

He also wrote fiction under several names, including John Somers and Christopher Haddon. Many readers know him best through Francis Beeding, the joint pen name he used with Hilary St. George Saunders for a long run of detective stories and thrillers. The two men also used David Pilgrim for some collaborative work.

Palmer spent much of the interwar period in Geneva, where he worked in the Secretariat of the League of Nations from 1920 to 1938. That international setting overlapped with his most productive years as a writer and helped shape the outward-looking, suspenseful fiction that still keeps his name in print.