Then there are detective stories, with a female detective, named Judith Lee; a great innovation at the time. Judith Lee begins as a teacher of lip-reading to the deaf and dumb, and comes to apply this accomplishment to detection. It is often a mistake in such a case for an author to introduce two novelties at once, a woman and a lip-reader, but my grandfather brings it off with considerable success, and the stories have a remarkable freshness. The heroines in my grandfather's works fall very much into a type. Beautiful they may or may not be (sometimes their plainess is specific), and my grandfather never really succeeds at suggesting glamour or sexual allure, but always the girls are energetic, anti-conventional, self-reliant, talkative and rather vulgar. You like them or you don't, one might say. He hoped much commercially of Judith Lee, but that first foul War cut her short. I am sure she was radiant in uniform.

Robert Aickman, in his autobiography, The Attempted Rescue.