Alfred Walter Stewart (5 September 1880 – 1 July 1947) was a British chemist and part-time novelist who wrote twenty seven detective novels and a pioneering science fiction work between 1923 and 1947 under the pseudonym of JJ Connington. His most prominent protagonist was Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, who first appeared in his novel Murder in the Maze (1927).
Biography Born in Glasgow in 1880, Stewart was the youngest of three sons of the Reverend Dr. Stewart, Clerk to the University Senate and Professor of Divinity. After attending Glasgow High School he entered Glasgow University, graduating 1902, taking chemistry as his major. His outstanding performance earned him the Mackay-Smith scholarship.
After spending a year in Marburg engaging in research under Theodor Zincke, he was elected to an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and then in 1903 entered University College, London. Here he began independent research. His work, which formed part of his thesis, gained him a DSc degree from Glasgow University in 1907 and he was soon elected to a Carnegie Research Fellowship (1905–1908).
He decided to pursue an academic career and in 1908 wrote Recent Advances in Organic Chemistry which proved to be a popular textbook whose success encouraged him to write a companion volume on Inorganic and Physical Chemistry in 1909.
In 1909 Stewart was appointed to a lectureship in organic chemistry at Queen's University, Belfast and in 1914 was appointed Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity at the University of Glasgow. During World War I he worked for the Admiralty. In 1918 he drew attention to the result of a beta particle change in a radioactive element and suggested the term isobar as complementary to isotope.
He retired from his academic work in 1944 following recurrent heart problems.
Stewart is now chiefly remembered for his first novel, Nordenholt's Million (1923), an early ecocatastrophe disaster novel in which denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth run amok and destroy world agriculture. The eponymous plutocrat Nordenholt constructs a refuge for the chosen few in Scotland, fortifying the Clyde valley. The novel is similar in spirit to such disaster stories as Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933) and anticipates the theme of John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956).
Dorothy L. Sayers paid tribute to Stewart's The Two Tickets Puzzle in her The Five Red Herrings. She gave him full credit and built on one of his ideas for part of the solution of her mystery.
John Dickson Carr was also an admirer of Stewart'sCarr, John Dickson The Greatest Game in the World, 1946 and Carr's first novel in 1930 mentioned two of Stewart's earlier novels with admiration.
Bibliography
Sir Clinton Driffield novels
Murder in the Maze, 1927 Tragedy at Ravensthorpe, 1927 Mystery at Lynden Sands, 1928 The Case with Nine Solutions, 1928 Nemesis at Raynham Parva, 1929 ( Grim Vengeance) The Boathouse Riddle, 1931 The Sweepstake Murders, 1931 The Castleford Conundrum, 1932 The Ha-Ha Case, 1934 (a.k.a. The Brandon Case) In Whose Dim Shadow, 1935 (a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery) A Minor Operation, 1937 Truth Comes Limping, 1938 For Murder Will Speak, 1938 (a.k.a. Murder Will Speak) The Twenty-One Clues, 1941 No Past Is Dead, 1942 Jack-in-the-Box, 1944 Common Sense Is All You Need, 1947
Superintendent Ross novels The Eye in the Museum, 1929 The Two Tickets Puzzle, 1930 (a.k.a. The Two Ticket Puzzle)
Max Brand novels The Counsellor, 1939 The Four Defences, 1940
Other novels Nordenholt's Million, London, Bombay, Sydney: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1923; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 2016 Almighty Gold, 1924 Death at Swaythling Court, 1926 The Dangerfield Talisman, 1926 Tom Tiddler's Island, 1933 (a.k.a. Gold Brick Island)
Short stories "After Death the Doctor", (London) Daily News, 25 to 29 January 1934 "Before Insulin", 1937
Nonfiction Stereochemistry, 1907 Recent Advances in Organic Chemistry, 1908 Inorganic and Physical Chemistry, 1909 Some Physico-chemical Themes, 1922 Alias J. J. Connington, 1947 (repr. 2015)
References
External links
Obituary of Alfred Walter Stewart (PDF) Norbert Nail: Genialer Chemiker und Meister des Detektivromans. Mit mathematischer Logik auf Mörderjagd - Das biografische Rätsel rund um die Philipps-Universität, in: Marburger UniJournal Nr. 56 (2018), p. 40; Nr. 57 (2018/19), p. 32 Norbert Nail: 100 Jahre J. J. Conningtons "Nordenholt's Million"