Connington, J.J.

The Scottish writer A. (Alfred) W. (Walter) Stewart had two successful but entirely different careers. Under his own name, he was a well-known chemist, the author of respected specialist works and textbooks and a lecturer in the subject at several British universities: 1919-44 as a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast. Under the pseudonym J.J. Connington, he wrote a famous science-fiction novel and a whole row of crime novels, some of which are regarded as classics. He was a member of the Detection Club, and his stories have been praised by writers such as John Dickson Carr, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers: the latter openly admitted that she had been inspired by Connington’s books with regard to certain elements in her novel The Five Red Herrings (1931).