While fans of Eric Wright’s murder mysteries will welcome this partial autobiography by the creator of Inspector Charlie Salter, others will appreciate it as an immigrant’s story, full of poignancy and humour. Wright was born in 1929, one of 10 children in a South London working class family. His story spans the Second World War, military service, emigration to Winnipeg, menial jobs and university courses in Manitoba, and finally the move east to Toronto.

The memoir shows the source of Wright’s sensitivity to class inequities. He was the only member of his family to attend a middle class grammar school. As a scholarship winner, he became a displaced person – alienated from his family and, at the same time, an object of suspicion to his educated peers – his discomfort exacerbated by the insensitivity and deliberate cruelty of his teachers.

Later chapters on his struggles as an immigrant in Canada throw interesting light on his experience growing up in England. They show how most members of his class resembled immigrants in their own country, how they were considered members of an alien race, and excluded by language and economic hardship from all advantages of education or rewarding employment.

Wright’s story has a happy ending. He earns a university degree and a sense of belonging in his new country. He marries and has a child. A postscript describes a return visit to England and his reunion, as a successful writer, with some of his former schoolmates. But since the story ends abruptly in 1959, there is a sense of something unfinished or left unsaid.

Apart from the sketchiness of the ending, my other cavil is with the title. Granted, it is a phrase out of an era less sensitive to blunt descriptions of the handicapped and impoverished, but it still jars.