Robert Alfred John Walling (11 January 1869, Exeter – 4 September 1949 Plympton) was an English journalist and author of detective novels, who signed his works "R. A. J. Walling".^[1]

Career

Walling worked as a reporter for the newspaper Western Daily Mercury in Plymouth before working as the company's sales representative in western Cornwall. In 1891 in Plymouth he started a newspaper specialising in football. In 1893 he became editor-in-chief of the Bicycling News in Coventry. In 1894 he returned to Plymouth, where he participated in the April 1895 launch of the Western Evening Herald, Plymouth's first evening newspaper. In 1904 he became the managing director/editor of the Western Newspaper Company and joined the board of directors in 1915. In 1910 he became a magistrate in addition to his other work but resigned a few years later. He also chaired for some time Plymouth's Chamber of Commerce. In 1921 Sir Leicester Harmsworth (as owner of the Western Morning News) acquired The Western Daily Mercury from the Western Newspaper Company, which before the acquisition owned the Western Daily Mercury and the Western Evening Herald. Upon the acquisition, Walling resigned as managing director/editor from the Western Newspaper Company and became editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Western Independent, where he continued until his retirement in 1945. He remained on the board of directors of the Western Newspaper Company until his death in 1949.

In addition to his editorial and managerial work, Walling wrote news stories, travel articles, biographies, short detective novels published as newspaper serials, and, in his later years, detective novels published in book form. His detective novel The Third Degree (1923) was adapted and published in book form by Albert Pigasse in France in the collection Le Masque under the title L’Agenda de M. Lanson. Walling's first detective novel (not published first in serial form) was The Dinner Party at Bardolph's (1927), published in Paris in 1931 as Le Financier Bardolph and published by Mondadori in Milan in 1932 as Sei a tavola. In 1932 there appeared in The Fatal Five Minutes Walling's recurrent protagonist Philip Tolefree, a private detective often asked by an insurance company to solve whodunit puzzles.

R. A. J. Walling's place in detective fiction is that of a competent practitioner of the British Golden Age novel. ... Philip Tolefree plays the role of the detective in most of Walling's books. Starting out as a private enquiry agent in non-criminal insurance matters, he takes on his first murder case in the Fatal Five Minutes. ... Tolefree has his own Watson, James Farrar, who narrates the first stories, is dropped, and then appears a character in later works. ...^[1]

The character Philip Tolefree has a friend, Scotland Yard's Inspector Pierce, who appears in many of the novels and engages in friendly competition with, and occasionally helps, Tolefree.

Will Cuppy wrote a blurb for Walling's detective novel The Corpse with the Floating Foot.^[2]

Family

In 1894 Walling married Florence Victoria Greet. Robert Victor Walling was their son.

Selected publications

References