Raymond Postgate Biography and List of Works

English social historian and mystery writer, whose best-known crime novel is VERDICT OF TWELVE (1940). Postgate's sister was Margaret Isabel Cole (1893-1980), who wrote with her husband G.D.H. Cole (1889-1959) several mystery novels. Postgate was a devoted socialist and he later became an authority on gastronomy.

Verdict of twelve (1940) - an application of Marx's famous thesis that a man's social position determines his consciousness. In the story Rosalie van Beer, a middle-aged widow with a fondness for wine, is on trial for murder by poisoning. The novel studies the minds of twelve members of a jury, who hold in their hands the power of life and death. Postgate suggests that their background and their pasts make the verdict inevitable. Postagate's other two novels, Somebody at the Door (1943) and The Ledger Is Kept (1953) have similar social basis - "She thought to herself, in a manner as near to humour as any thoughts of hers could be, that it wouldn't half be queer if she had to be juror in a murder case. Somebody who did know how, judging somebody that didn't. For she never attempted to forget that she had killed her aunt, and she never had the least regret. She was rather proud of it, though she remembered having several bad scares and was certain she'd never do such a thing again."

Raymond Postgate was born in Cambridge the eldest son of Professor J.P. Postgate, a classical scholar. He attended St. John's College, Oxford, and was a conscientious objector during World War I. In 1916 he was jailed for two weeks. He married Daisy Lansbury - her father was the famous pacifist and leader of the Labour Party. Postgate also had socialist connections through his sister, who married the Socialist economist and historian G.D.H. Cole. Before joining the Labour Party, Postgate was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

As a journalist Postgate started his career in 1918 working on the Daily Herald, Lansbury's Weekly, and as a department editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1927 to 1928. He was a European representative for Alfred A. Knopf publishes (1929-49), edited Tribune from 1940-42 to saved it from Communist who had captured it and were using it to denounce the Finnish imperialist war on Soviet Russia. (Actually, Finland was attacked by the Red Army in the winter of 1939-40, and lost huge areas to the Soviet Union after the Continuation War 1941-44.) From 1942 to 1949 Postgate worked at the Board of Trade and Ministry of Supply.

EVERY MAN IS GOD (1959) told the history of a family and a house, beginning in 1883 and running though the proceeding decades. The reader is transported to a vanished world - the old British army, the underworld of Victorian vice, the peace of Edwardian country life. Postgate paints a picture of quiet married love, peace, and hope, with nostalgic charm. "There are short 'dead patches' in history just as there are insensitive areas on the human thigh. They are the times when one period has ended and another has not yet begun, when for a brief while men can only see a blank before them. What is past has gone; something else will come, but what it will be nobody knows; nothing has yet happened, but soon it will. Meanwhile there is an uncoloured flatness around; with nothing but the ordinary daily routine of duties to relieve it." (from Every Man is God)

Among Postgate's other works are three detective stories, a novel NO EPITAPH (1932), short stories, and biographies. He wrote many books about workers' history, and a biography about his father-in-law, George Lansbury. Postgate had always been interested in food and wine, and he decided to make an effort to raise standards by editing the reports of a band of volunteers on their visits to British hotels and restaurants. The highly influential Good Food Club was born as a result. Postgate wrote books about choosing and serving wine, and edited THE GOOD FOOD GUIDE. In 1962 the publication was taken over by the Consumers' Association. Postgate died on March 29, 1971.

For further reading: by M. Cole (1949); Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by J.M. Reilly (1985); The Life of Raymond Postgate by J. Postagte and M.A. Stomach (1994); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996) - NOTE: The Coles' mystery writing career began with The Brooklyn Murders (1923), which was written by Douglas Cole alone. A full-length biography of him by M.I. Cole was published in 1972.

THE INTERNATIONAL, (1918)