Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within She Done It that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main penguin series in order.

Our book today is The Rasp by Philip MacDonald, Penguin 79.

This book was first published in 1924 and then joined the Penguin series as a paperback in January

1937. It was McDonald's first entry in the Green Crime series, but not

his first penguin overall. His novel, Patrol, was actually one of the first 20 penguins

ever to be published, appearing as number 13 in the orange livery of the fiction strand of

the series. The Rasp was Philip McDonald's first solo novel, too. He had previously written

two books with his father, which they had published in 1920 and 1923 under the collective

pseudonym of Oliver Fleming. The Rasp also marks the first appearance of Colonel Anthony

Getherin, an amateur detective about whom Philip would eventually write 12 books.

11 of these appeared in the 1920s and 30s between the First and Second World Wars,

and then he published one final Gatherine in 1959, the list of Adrian Messenger.

Being a writer was pretty much Philip McDonald's only job. He seems to have been able to make it work

professionally right from the get-go. Perhaps it helped that his father and grandfather were both

writers too. The latter, George MacDonald, was a fantasy novelist and a friend of Lewis Carroll's.

Philip's mother Constance was an actress too, so presumably a creative career

was encouraged rather than forbidden in the McDonald household. Philip was born in 1900 in London.

Although the family was Scottish, from Aberdeenshire, grandfather George had long since migrated south.

Philip termed 18 a couple of months after the First World War broke out,

and enlisted in a cavalry regiment, in which capacity he served in the area of the Middle East,

then known as Mesopotamia. Upon his return to civilian life, he worked on those two novels with

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