Behind The Screen first appeared as a serial in ‘The Listener’ in 1930, and was eventually published in hard covers, together with The Scoop, in 1983, when it was described as ‘a more domestic drama, of murder within a family [which] develops into a problem of meticulous timing’.
The contributors were: Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley and Ronald Knox. The story construction was approached in the spirit of a game. Walpole launched it on his own; Christie and Sayers continued as they fancied, each where her predecessor left off and only the last three authors consulted together on how to unravel the clues presented by the first three – as the jacket copy of the hardback says, ‘in other words, they themselves had to solve a mystery’.