Charles Kingston O'Mahony

Charles Kingston O'Mahony was born around 1884^[1][2] in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in Ireland.^[3] In 1908, he was living at 14 Rugby Chambers in London's Rugby Street.^[4] He married Julia Christine Ellis in Staines, Middlesex, in 1910.^[5]

O'Mahony worked as a journalist and author.^[3] His first book was an historical study of The Viceroys of Ireland, published by John Long in London in 1912, which he wrote as Charles O'Mahony. Later he used the pen-name of Charles Kingston^[6][7] and wrote a number of popular non-fiction works such as Remarkable Rogues: The careers of some notable criminals of Europe and America (1921), Society Sensations (1922), and A Gallery of Rogues (1924). Between 1923 and 1930 he published eight books dealing with the law and the courts, such as, Famous Judges and Famous Trials, Dramatic Days at the Old Bailey, and The Judges and the Judged.^[8]

He published his first novel, Stolen Virtue, in 1921, afterwards publishing mainly detective fiction, often set in London,^[2] such as The Portland Place Mystery (1926), The Highgate Mystery (1928), and Poison in Kensington (1934). He published seven novels featuring Chief Inspector Wake of Scotland Yard, starting with Murder in Piccadilly in 1936.^[9] His publishers were principally the large popular publishers of his time such as John Lane, Stanley Paul, and Ward Lock.

O'Mahony's Remarkable Rogues (1921) was reviewed in The Saturday Review who described it as an "artless and somewhat dateless book written in the style of the novelette". A series of lively sketches, the Review found them more entertaining than edifying.^[10]

His Society Sensations was reviewed in The Bookman in 1922 who opined that his works were easy to assemble from newspaper reports, memoirs, and similar sources, but acknowledged their entertainment value and that there was a significant market for such works. Of the book under review, they noted that most of the scandals involved men's misadventures with women and that a cynic might view the book "as a warning against marriage and women in general".^[11]

Enemies of Society (1927) was a selection of murders that The Saturday Review noted included five doctors of medicine such as the "Lambeth poisoner" and serial killer Dr Thomas Neill Cream, and the lexicographer Dr William Chester Minor.^[12] In 1928, the same publication wrote of O'Mahony's choice of Rogues and Adventuresses that some figures from the past are "best forgotten"^[13] while The Bookman said that at least O'Mahony was honest in attempting to do no more than entertain, which he did with a terse and vigorous prose style, even if his taste was somewhat morbid.^[14]

In fiction, The Portland Place Mystery (1926) was described as working its way "smoothly along the accepted lines of high life romance."^[15] Poison in Kensington (1934) features a blackmailing doctor of medicine whose motives are revealed to be pure in the end in a plot the reviewer found unlikely.^[16] Murder in Piccadilly (1936) was republished by Poisoned Pen Press in 2015 in the British Library Crime Classics series with an introduction by crime writer Martin Edwards^[17] in which he characterised O'Mahony's work as traditional, competently plotted, and "infused with a quiet sense of humour", but observed that the plot of inter-generational conflict leading to murder was not new, even to O'Mahony's work, and he was not in the avant-garde of 1930s crime writing. Nonetheless, Edwards identified in O'Mahony an affinity for the London underworld found in districts such as Soho, and a willingness for his characters to mention contemporary criminal cases such as the rape and murder of 10 year old Vera Page in 1931 which is referenced in the book by O'Mahony's detective Wake. The book is also notable for leaving the murder, and the introduction of Wake who will solve it, until halfway through the story.^[18]

O'Mahony died in the county of Surrey,^[1] England, on 9 November 1944.^[19] His address at the time of his death was The Old Red Cottage, Weston Green, Esher. He left an estate of £282.^[20] His last book, Fear Followed On, in the Chief Inspector Wake series, was published posthumously by Stanley Paul in 1945.^[21]