And Always A Detective R F Stewart

Getting Your Hands on And Always A Detective R F Stewart

Most people asking about this are running into the same wall: the book is out of print, it never got a widespread modern reissue, and the scan quality on whatever copies float around the internet is usually miserable. I spent a few weeks tracking down a readable version for a friend who wanted to study Stewart's structure, and here is what actually works. The original edition came out in 1930 through Victor Gollancz in the UK. The American edition followed that year with a different title in some printings. Neither is in active print. That means your options narrow quickly. Project Gutenberg does not carry it. The book is too recent for US public domain, and UK copyright runs to seventy years after the author's death. Stewart died in 1964, so the book entered public domain in the EU in 2035. We are still solidly in copyright territory everywhere that matters.

What that means in practice: you are looking at used book markets or library archives. I found a copy through AbeBooks listed as a 1930 first edition Gollancz hardcover. It was dog-eared, the spine was cracked, but the text was intact. Cost me about thirty pounds plus shipping. If you just want to read it and don't care about condition, Amazon Marketplace and eBay have paperback reprints from print-on-demand services. The text is usually scraped from a library scan. The OCR is hit or miss. You will see garbage characters in places where the original typesetting had unusual punctuation or italics.

The workaround I actually used

Here is the thing nobody tells you about scanning out-of-print British police procedurals from the late nineteen twenties: the pagination in library copies is a mess because many surviving copies have been rebound by institutions that do not preserve original page numbers. I needed specific chapter references for a paper and kept getting wrong citations because the library copy I was using had been rebound with pages shuffled. The fix was to cross-reference the British Library's catalogue record, which lists the original pagination, and then verify chapter breaks against the HathiTrust digital copy of the Gollancz edition. HathiTrust only provides access to authenticated institutional users, so if you are reading this from home you may not have direct access. But if you are a student or affiliated with a university, use your institutional login. The scan is clean enough to search. I pulled the exact page numbers that way and confirmed them against a physical copy I bought separately.

What you should know before you invest time in this

Stewart is not Agatha Christie. He is not even in the same conversation as Dorothy L. Sayers. His work is competent, workmanlike detective fiction from the Golden Age school. The plotting is fair-play. The clues are laid out. The resolution follows logically. But the prose is functional, not elegant, and the character work is thin. If you are approaching this as literary criticism, you will be disappointed. If you are approaching it as a craft study, it is useful. The plot of And Always a Detective revolves around a detective figure dealing with a case that tests professional boundaries. Stewart was a lawyer before he became a full-time writer, and that shows in how he constructs the. The procedural details are accurate to the period. The legal mechanisms he describes actually work the way he says they do, which is more than you can say for a lot of crime fiction from this era.

Common mistakes people make trying to access this book

First, don't bother with Z-Library or similar shadow libraries for this title. The file that circulates there is almost always a poor-quality scan with missing pages. I compared three different leaked PDFs and each one was missing different sections. The text gaps are significant enough that you cannot reconstruct the missing parts from context. Second, don't assume Kindle or eBook editions are available through legitimate channels. Wattpad and similar user-generated platforms sometimes have fan uploads, but those are unauthorized and the transcription quality is unreliable. I saw a version on one such site that had entire dialogue sections rewritten because the transcriber could not read the original typesetting. The most reliable path remains the used book trade. WorldCat will tell you which libraries near you hold a copy. Interlibrary loan is your best friend if you do not want to buy a physical book. Most university libraries will acquire it through ILL if their own copy is unavailable. It took me about ten business days to get a scan sent to me through my university's interlibrary loan system. The image quality was acceptable for reading, though not good enough for citation work.

A note on the detective character and the title

The title is somewhat misleading if you are expecting a hardboiled American private eye. The detective in this novel operates within the British tradition. He is methodical, restrained, and works largely within established legal frameworks. Stewart was writing during the tail end of the Golden Age, and the book reflects that. It is closer to a puzzle mystery than to the emerging hardboiled style that was taking over American crime fiction at the time. If you are researching the evolution of the British detective novel between the wars, this book is a useful data point. It sits between the classic Christie/Sayers model and the grittier postwar style that would emerge after nineteen forty-five. The transition is visible in how Stewart handles his detective's methods and his attitude toward the police. He respects the institution but shows its limitations. That was a notable shift for the period. I have read through probably a dozen Stewart novels over the years while tracking down material for various projects. His output was steady but uneven. And Always a Detective is above his average, though "above average" in this context still means solid genre craftsmanship rather than anything distinctive. The case itself is well-constructed. The red herrings are present but not overdone. The solution, when it arrives, is earned rather than contrived.

For what it is, it does what it sets out to do. Just make sure you are getting a clean text before you commit to reading it. A garbled OCR copy will ruin the experience more than any other factor.