Sutherland Scott is the pen name of Dr. William Clunie Harvey … British Medical Officer, lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and murder mystery writer extraordinaire.

Apart from being a distinguished doctor, Dr. Harvey was also a prolific writer. He was senior author of such textbooks as “Milk Production and Control”, “Milk Products”, “Insect Pests”, and “Food Hygiene”, was also a monthly contributor to “Better Health” and wrote countless articles for professional journals and the national press.

Dr. Harvey also wrote an operetta and several plays, and was involved in the Southgate A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) Entertainments Association, and was chairman of the Intimate Theatre Playgoers Association in Palmers Green, London. This theatre, originally built in 1931 as a church hall for St. Monica’s Roman Catholic Church, was transformed into a professional repertory theatre in 1935. It gained significant recognition, notably serving as a venue from which the BBC televised 14 plays in the late 1940s, and was described as “the home of so many present-day stars of stage and screen”.

His most notable contribution as an author, however, is as the murder-mystery writer Sutherland Scott. The name is a combination of his Scottish heritage (his grandfather’s blacksmith’s forge still stands in Wigtownshire, Scotland) and his mother’s name: Catherine Sutherland Waters.

As Sutherland Scott, he wrote 13 novels between 1936 and 1956, plus 1953’s widely published history of the modern detective novel “Blood in Their Ink”. His work has been republished in the United States, and translated into French, Turkish, and Japanese.