A Golden Age British Mystery: The Death of a Millionaire by G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole

Who Were G.D.H. & Margaret Cole?

George Douglas Howard Cole was an interesting and weird dude! He was an economist and political theorist and historian and also wrote 29 detective stories with his wife Margaret Cole. Cole didn’t care for the noise that the radio made, and he didn’t trust science or care to understand math, but eccentricities aside, he was a pretty smart dude.

He was the thought leader behind guild socialism, which is the the concept of production being organized through worker guilds. He was able to escape conscription from the First World War from advising the union on their response to any wartime legislation that included the Munitions of War Act of 1915.

He spent his years being active with union work, and worked as a sectary to the Advisory Committees established by the Labour Party, and worked as a Labour Correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, a job that his wife basically said he couldn’t keep up with on the daily.

Cole joined the Fabian Society, a socialist organization that founded the London School of Economics and still exists today, and started honing his ideas on socialism, with influence from William Morris’s News from Nowhere. The dude did not consider himself a social democrat or a Marxist, favoring a more community-oriented approach to the means of production, where the goods would stay in the neighborhood. He also wrote a few books on the history of the co-operative movement, where companies are members who buy and sell good and services together, as well as books with titles like “The Future of Local Government” (1921), “Some Essentials of Socialist Propaganda” (1932), and “What Marx Really Meant”(1934). This guy was a big-time socialist who really believed in the cause and worked for it.

He was married to Margaret Isabel Postgate for over 40 years, but people close to him say that he seemed to have a lot more affection for other men than his own wife. Margaret was a pretty interesting lady in her own regard. Like her husband, she was also a socialist, and even had a brother that was jailed for refusing military service that he was refused exemption from. She met G.D.H. and worked with her husband for the Fabian Society. In 1924, they moved to Oxford and spent many years teaching and writing.

She had a lot of accolades as an educator and politician. She was an alderman on London County Council from 1952 to 1965, a member of the Inner London Education Authority, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). There are 29 detective novels that the Coles wrote together, credited as G.D.H. and M. Cole, as well as a couple of radio plays. How these two socialist educators ended up being semi-popular murder mystery writers is a story that someone should get to the bottom of. Unfortunately, the internet is not much help.

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Cover Image Credit: Background image of London is by Walter Thornbury and is in the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Book image image cover photograph “Edwardian man and dog, possibly John Hook, 1907” is by John Greenland Hook Collection and it is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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