Alfred Walter Stewart (5 September 1880 – 1 July 1947) was a British chemist and part-time novelist who wrote seventeendetective novels and a pioneeringscience fiction work between 1923 and 1947 under the pseudonym ofJJ Connington. He created several fictional detectives, including Superintendent Ross and Chief ConstableSir Clinton Driffield.
Born inGlasgow in 1880, Stewart was the youngest of three sons of the Reverend Dr. Stewart, Clerk to the University Senate and Professor of Divinity. After attendingGlasgow High School he enteredGlasgow University, graduating 1902, taking chemistry as his major. His outstanding performance earned him the Mackay-Smith scholarship.
After spending a year inMarburg engaging in research underTheodor Zincke, he was elected to an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and then in 1903 enteredUniversity College, London. Here he began independent research. His work, which formed part of histhesis, gained him aDSc degree from Glasgow University in 1907 and he was soon elected to a Carnegie Research Fellowship (1905–1908).
He decided to pursue an academic career and in 1908 wroteRecent Advances in Organic Chemistry which proved to be a popular textbook whose success encouraged him to write a companion volume on Inorganic and Physical Chemistry in 1909.
In 1909 Stewart was appointed to a lectureship in organic chemistry atQueen's University, Belfast and in 1914 was appointed Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity at the University of Glasgow. DuringWorld War I he worked for the Admiralty. In 1918 he drew attention to the result of abeta particle change in a radioactive element and suggested the termisobar as complementary toisotope.
He retired from his academic work in 1944 following recurrent heart problems.
Stewart is now chiefly remembered for his first novel,Nordenholt's Million (1923), an earlyecocatastrophedisaster novel in whichdenitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth run amok and destroy world agriculture. The eponymous plutocrat Nordenholt constructs a refuge for the chosen few in Scotland, fortifying theClyde valley. The novel is similar in spirit to such disaster stories asPhilip Wylie andEdwin Balmer'sWhen Worlds Collide (1933) and anticipates the theme ofJohn Christopher'sThe Death of Grass (1956).
Dorothy L. Sayers paid tribute to Stewart'sThe Two Tickets Puzzle in herThe Five Red Herrings. She gave him full credit and built on one of his ideas for part of the solution of her mystery.
John Dickson Carr was also an admirer of Stewart's[1] and Carr's first novel in 1930 mentioned two of Stewart's earlier novels with admiration.
