About John Bude

John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.

He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.

This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that he found himself in.

He eventually returned to Maidstone, the town of his birth, and during the Second World War he ran his local Home Guard unit as he had been deemed unfit to serve in the forces.

He later lived in Loose, Kent, and after that near Rye, East Sussex, and enjoyed golf and painting but never learned to drive although that did not stop him apparently offering advice to his wife when she was driving! He had met his wife, Betty, when producing plays back in Maidstone and they married in 1933.

After becoming a full-time writer, he wrote some 30 crime fiction novels, many featuring his two main series characters Superintendent Meredith and Inspector Sherwood. He began with 'The Cornish Coast Murder' in 1935 and his final two crime novels, 'A Twist of the Rope' and 'The Night the Fog Came Down' were published posthumously in 1958.

He was a founder member of the Norfolk-based Crime Writers Association (CWA) in 1953 and was a co-organiser of the Crime Book Exhibition that was one of the CWA's early publicity initiatives. He was a popular and hard-working member of the CWA's committee from its inception through to May 1957.

Under his own name he also wrote a number of fantasy novels, the most well-known of which is 'The Lumpton Gobbelings' (1954). In addition he wrote a children's book, 'The Snuffly Snorty Dog' (1946).

He was admitted to hospital in Hastings on 6 November 1957, having just delivered his what turned out to be his final manuscript to his publisher, for a routine operation but he died two days later.

Fellow British crime writer Martin Edwards comments, "Bude writes both readably and entertainingly. His work may not have been stunning enough to belong with the greats, but there is a smoothness and accomplishment about even his first mystery, 'The Cornish Coast Murder', which you don't find in many début mysteries."

Interestingly he was the dedicatee of 'The Case of the Running Mouse' (1944) by his friend Christopher Bush. The dedication stated, 'May his stature, and his circulation, increase.'

NB: He was not born on 1 January but the system does not allow a date of birth without a month and date so it defaults to 1 January.