Donald Landels Henderson was born in 1905; he had a twin sister, but their mother died four days after giving birth. Their father re-married when the twins were four, and Henderson was to say, ‘I cannot pretend to have enjoyed anything very much about my childhood or adolescence.’
Since his teens, he had enjoyed acting, and had also dreamed of becoming a writer. He joined a touring repertory company, and married an actress called Janet Morrison, a single parent who later gave up her son for adoption. The marriage soon failed, and the couple separated.
Henderson began to combine writing with his acting career, but this was a period of worldwide economic depression—‘the Slump’—and money was always short. After a failed theatrical venture in London, ‘in a fearful burst of enthusiasm I sat down and wrote three novels running, scarcely leaving myself time to think them out, so anxious was I to get farther and farther away from the brink of the precipice.’
Henderson worked for the BBC in London during the war, when a German bomb fell on the house where he resided. He was rescued, but his lungs were badly damaged. It is possible that the episode precipitated his death at only 44, in 1947, just three years after the publication of Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper.
