When Margery Lawrence created her 'psychic sleuth' Miles Pennoyer in the mid-1940s, she gave life to a character who has since taken a place alongside Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and Dion Fortune's Dr Taverner as one of the greatest, and most memorable of those specialists dealing with cases that baffle more conventional medical practitioners. A student of many branches of the occult and the arcane, he lives in quiet elegance on a street overlooking the Thames; a street properly named 'Queen Street', but re-dubbed 'Queer Street' by those who know of Pennoyer's field of expertise and the desperate clients who seek his aid when they have fallen foul of supernatural forces. Like another great consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, Pennoyer is accompanied by a faithful friend, the writer Jerome Latimer, who is always on hand to record his companion's greatest successes.

The first seven Miles Pennoyer cases were originally published as Number Seven Queer Street in 1945; a further four appeared in 1959 under the title Master of Shadows, while a twelfth Pennoyer story was published posthumously in 1971. The Casebook of Miles Pennoyer Vol. One collects together the first six Pennoyer stories, and presents a wide range of cases, from the benign hauntings of 'The Case of Ella McLeod' and 'The Case of the White Snake' to the more malign entities at work in 'The Case of the Young Man with the Scar' and 'The Case of Leannabh Sidhe'. These last two stories have never been printed in North America, having been dropped from the American edition of Number Seven Queer Street; and Ash-Tree Press is pleased to be able to make them available to a new audience almost fifty years after their first publication.