He acted in the 1905 production of Aristophanes’ The Clouds, of which the Times reviewer said: "Among individual actors the best was Mr. C. W. Mercer, whose 'Strepsiades' was full of fun, and who possesses real comic talent.
[2][3] Among the many useful friends Mercer made in the OUDS were Gervais Rentoul, who asked him to be his best man,[4] and Lily Brayton's husband, actor Oscar Asche, later producer of the play Kismet, and writer of Chu Chin Chow.
However, in 1908 his father obtained his son a post as pupil to a prominent barrister, H. G. Muskett, whose practice often required his appearing in court on behalf of the police commissioner.
In his first memoirs, As Berry & I Were Saying, he recalls his involvement in the trial of the poisoner Hawley Harvey Crippen, when he returned from acting with the Old Stagers, at Canterbury, to have first look at the legal brief.
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Mercer was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the 3rd County of London Yeomanry (Sharpshooters),[7] although his stories continued to appear in the Windsor until March 1915.
Since 1914, the Mercer family home had been Elm Tree Road, behind the north-west side of Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood, where his friends Oscar and Lily Asche were close neighbours.
After the Great War, many ex-officers found that the rise in the cost of living in London precluded maintaining the style of life of a gentleman to which they had become accustomed; some looked beyond England.
They chose the resort town Pau, in the western Pyrenees, in the Basses–Pyrénées département (now Pyrénées-Atlantiques) – where lived a sizeable British expat colony, but when the Mercers moved in is unknown.
They rented the Villa Maryland, on Rue Forster, where Mercer proved an exacting husband, while Bettine was a social woman, and by 1929, the failure of their marriage was evident.
In the event, she returned to her family in the U.S. Less than a year later, on 10 February 1934, at Chertsey Register office, Mercer married Doreen Elizabeth Lucie Bowie, whom he met on a cruise in 1932.
With France falling to the Wehrmacht in June 1940, the Mercers hurriedly arranged caretakers for Cockade, and then escaped the country – in company of visiting friends, Matheson Lang and wife – and traversed Spain en route to Portugal.
As the war concluded, the couple realised their plan of returning to Cockade – but were disappointed in the decrepitude of the house and the socially conscious, post-war attitude of their one-time servants.
After some months, the Mercers obtained exit visas and returned to Umtali, Southern Rhodesia, (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), where they lived for the rest of his life.
The furniture in France was shipped to Rhodesia, as were the Waterloo Bridge balusters (see The House that Berry Built), which had never reached Cockade, but had been stored in England during the Second World War.
"Berry & Co." capture the English upper classes of the Edwardian era, still self-assured, but affected by changing social attitudes and the decline of their fortunes.
The 'Chandos' books, starting with Blind Corner, in 1927, marked a change in style and content, being thrillers set mainly in Continental Europe (often in Carinthia, Austria), wherein the hero–narrator, Richard Chandos, and colleagues, including George Hanbury and Jonathan Mansel (who also featured in the 'Berry' books), tackle criminals, protect the innocent, woo beautiful ladies, and hunt for treasure.
The Stolen March is a fantasy set in a lost realm, between Spain and France, where travellers encounter characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
A planned sequel, The Tempered Wind, is referred to in the quasi-autobiography, B-Berry and I Look Back, where Yates mentions abandoning the book as it failed to "take charge".
Some critics have suggested that the portrayal of the villainess represented a thinly-veiled attack on Mercer's first wife, although that could imply that the husband was a self-portrait, and as Smithers' states, "...he would hardly have held himself out in a character so feeble and flaccid.
The BBC produced an adaptation of She Fell Among Thieves in 1977, featuring Malcolm McDowell as Chandos, Michael Jayston as Mansel, and Eileen Atkins as Vanity Fair.
An episode of the ITV Hannay series, "A Point of Honour", was based on the eponymous short story published in The Brother of Daphne, but the source was uncredited.
In 1948 Richard Usborne wrote an article entitled Ladies and Gentlemen v. Cads and Rotters about the works of Dornford Yates in Volume 3, Number 11 of The Windmill, a literary magazine.
In 2015, Kate Macdonald published Novelists Against Social Change: Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920–1960, which examines the work of Buchan, Yates and Angela Thirkell.