is essential for someone to cater for the illiterate ...” The titular character of Winifred Watson's novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day refers to Dell as the source of her inspiration to encourage a young gentleman to punch a rival by hissing, "Sock him one" at the key moment. In Richard Hughes's In Hazard, the engineer Souter aboard the steamer Archimedes has a nightmare about the late chief engineer who was lost at sea. Rather than try to sleep, he begins to read a book by Ethel M. Dell. P. G. Wodehouse refers to Dell in several of his stories. Some have opined that Wodehouse's character Rosie M. Banks is based on Dell; however, Wodehouse himself told his biographer Richard Usborne that Rosie is based on Ruby M. Ayres. Wodehouse also mentions Dell by name in his novel Uncle Dynamite (1948), whose hero, Bill Oakshott, is several times encouraged to model himself on the masterful man in The Way of an Eagle. He also wrote the short story "Honeysuckle Cottage", which uses themes and characters very like those of Ethel M. Dell. In it, a writer of Raymond Chandler-like hard-boiled detective stories finds to his horror that his work (and later his whole life) is being possessed by characters who seem to come out of a syrupy romance novel by "Leila M. Pinkney". Here is a sample: D.H.Lawrence mentions Dell in the second draft of "The First Lady Chatterly" (Mondadori 1954), published as "John Thomas And Lady Jane" in 1972. In Cornelia Otis Skinner's popular Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942), the narrator says her travel-mate was well read but that she herself "had a secret letch for Ethel M. Dell." In M. John Harrison's novel The Centauri Device, "a calf-bound set of Ethel M. Dell firsts, signed and numbered by the author" are part of the detritus of the 20th Century arranged with other objets d'art at a narcotics party on 24th century Earth. In Gladys Mitchell's The Saltmarsh Murders, the curate mentions Ethel M. Dell. In Dorothy Sayers's novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, first published in 1928, Ethel M. Dell is mentioned as an example of escapist literature. "Servants and factory girls read about beautiful girls loved by dark, handsome men, all covered over with jewels and moving in scenes of gilded splendour. And passionate spinsters read Ethel M. Dell. And dull men in