Robert Alfred John Walling (11 January 1869, Exeter – 4 September 1949 Plympton) was an English journalist and author of detective novels, who signed his works "R. A. J.
His detective novel The Third Degree (1923) was adapted and published in book form by Albert Pigasse in France in the collection Le Masque under the title L’Agenda de M. Lanson.
In 1932 there appeared in The Fatal Five Minutes Walling's recurrent protagonist Philip Tolefree, a private detective often asked by an insurance company to solve whodunit puzzles.
Starting out as a private enquiry agent in non-criminal insurance matters, he takes on his first murder case in the Fatal Five Minutes.
... Tolefree has his own Watson, James Farrar, who narrates the first stories, is dropped, and then appears a character in later works.