Tony Walker

There hasn't been time.

It only happened last night.

He said, last night be blowed.

It all happened in February 1919.

The people you've described have been dead for years.

I said, oh.

And to think that I might have stuck to that nine pounds.

So that was My Adventure in Norfolk by A.J.

Allen.

So as normal, I'm going to tell you something about A.J.

Allen first.

So A.J.

Allen, born 1883, 11th of November, as it turns out, died 13th of December 1941, was the pen name of Leslie Harrison Lambert, an English short story writer, stage magician, radio personality and intelligence officer.

He was born in Nottingham and later associated with foreign office work.

He led the sort of double life that seems almost too apt for a writer of uncanny tales.

Civil servant by day, performer and raconteur by night, and in wartime a cryptographer at Bletchley Park's Hut 8, the unit working on German naval ciphers.

He first came to public notice in the 1920s and 1930s through his radio broadcasts for the BBC, where he read his own short stories in a conversational, confiding tone that listeners remembered for its intimacy and dry humour.

These stories, many of them likely supernatural or macabre, are typically framed as anecdotes of stories, adventures he claims to have experienced himself, told in a casual, slightly self-deprecating voice that makes the oddness of events feel more plausible rather than less.

Pieces such as, as we just heard, My Adventure in Norfolk, My Adventure at Chislehurst, The Nineteen Club, The Suitcase and A Joyride built his reputation as a quietly distinctive figure in British popular fiction between the wars.

So, Alan's background as an amateur magician, so that close-up magic work, and his work in intelligence both leave their fingerprints on the stories.