A ROOM IN CAMDEN TOWN

by David Lynn

Published London: Kangaroo Books [1944]

Kangaroo Books was a company set up by "Lynn" himself to publish his crime and proletarian fiction

His real name was David Warnock McClelland, born in Christchurch in 1907. He was prosecuted for vagrancy in Wellington in 1934, and stowed away from NZ to Australia in 1934 and back to NZ in 1937. In 1937 he said he was a former Communist and he had come from Christchurch. He died in London in 1969.

He made up the pseudonym from the names of his two children, David and Lynn.

[A kangaroo (“Gertrude”, originally with a book in her pouch) had been the logo of the American paperback publishers Pocket Books since 1939 but their English division, Pocket Books (G.B.) Ltd, was not opened until August 1949]