Ann is hopelessly in love with Ryder which is awkward since she’s married. There’s Joyce Malden, the step-daughter of the landlady, and there’s Ann Deighton.

He picks up some more pointers from two women who seem to be involved in the case but in ways that are not at all clear to our hero. The landlady, Mrs Malden, denies that any such person has ever lived there. Hooky’s first lead comes from the boarding house where Ryder lives.

Hooky thinks of himself as a pretty hardboiled character but he really doesn’t like powerful people who want to push around innocents like Edward Ryder. They’re prepared to take drastic steps to stop him. Now Ryder suspects that some such group is determined to stop him from developing his invention any further. It never occurred to him that there might be powerful interest groups that don’t want the textile industry revolutionised because they’re doing very nicely as it is. He’s a clever chap when it comes to science but a bit of an innocent when it comes to dealing with the world. It could revolutionise the textile industry. Ryder is a high school science teacher and part-time inventor and he’s come up with an invention that he thinks is pretty exciting. Obviously he’d like to stay alive after that as well, but surviving until Friday is the immediate priority. Ryder’s problem is that he needs to stay alive until the following Friday. A thin rather owlish individual named Edward Ryder. He is therefore very happy when a client turns up. His detective fiction included the series of Hooky Heffernan private eye mystery thrillers.īusiness hasn’t been too good for our narrator, Hooky Heffernan, and his betting on the ponies hasn’t been too successful recently either. He wrote at least 150 books in various genre. Laurence Meynell (1899-1989) was a British writer and he was one of those writers who had a long and successful career only to have his books disappear into oblivion after his death. The Frightened Man is a 1952 Hooky Heffernan private eye novel by Laurence Meynell.

Die by the Book by Laurence Meynell