“Have you heard the news, sir?” the waiter said.“I’m afraid I haven’t. What is it?”“Plumley’s dead, sir. Henry Plumley. We just got the news over the ’phone. Suicide they say it was. Anything else you want, sir?”Out-of-print for over nine decades and one of the rarest classic crime novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction, The Plumley Inheritance, first of the Ludovic Travers mysteries, is now available in a new edition by ...

There was no mess: just a dark stain one could see on the waistcoat. What was horrible was the contortion of the face and the tortured eyes. But even then I thought I knew him.There can be few people who would wish to go so far as to murder a literary agent. Which one takes the trouble to impersonate a well-known author and lure George Posfort of that calling to his violent end in an unlikely London hotel? And why, about the same time, should Richard Alton, a nice young sc...

I never did like missing people. Far too often we’ve found them dead.When that cheerful soul, Doris Bosford, asked Ludovic Travers of the Broad Street Detective Agency to trace her missing husband the case soon involved matters less innocent than a mere disappearance. Andrew Bosford had been a crooner, but investigation showed that his latest source of income seemed concerned with a smuggling racket that had its headquarters in France. With the discovery of a body on the s...

Isn’t it a tremendous coincidence that his murderer should also have had large front teeth?Ludovic Travers has received a good many queer requests and enquiries at the Broad Street Detective Agency, but a psychiatrist in fear of his life and in search of a bodyguard is something new. An appointment is made for the following day, but Travers has barely completed a few discreet enquiries concerning his new client when he receives another call. This time it is a summons from ...

“George Wharton said he hoped I’d have a nice murder for you.”Ludovic Travers and his wife choose to spend part of their honeymoon in the quiet town of Edensthorpe—one place where they can be sure of peace and quiet, and where an eminent author and his famous wife might not be recognised.Unfortunately for them, however, another fugitive has sought anonymity in the nearby village of Pettistone—a swindler named Brewse who has just completed a prison sentence for frau...

Providence, they say, is good to drunkards and children. Maybe there’s a third category—the unorthodox detective.A new case finds Ludovic Travers travelling to the respectable English Midlands town of Mainford. He is commissioned to investigate the death, under compromising circumstances, of Harry Landlace—a man of civic virtue. There is the suggestion of a smear and as Travers attempts to clear Landlace’s name, he uncovers something the dead man was on the verge of reveal...

His head went sideways, like a hopping sparrow’s on a lawn.The man who saves Henry Clandon’s life during the campaign in Sicily visits him once in hospital, gives his name as David Seeway, makes vague and apparently pointless reference to somebody else called Archie Dibben and a country town called Bassingford, and then virtually disappears. Eight years later, Henry Clandon, now a director of a London publishing firm, sets out to try and find his rescuer.This is ho...

It wasn’t I who discovered the body. I want to make that perfectly clear, if only for the benefit of a couple of club acquaintances of mine.Ludovic Travers, special investigator for Scotland Yard, commits murder? No—but at the end of this novel you will understand why he might claim to have done so.Sir William Pelle has become a missing person, and Superintendent Wharton of the Yard is prioritizing his recovery. But when Pelle is found murdered, there are serious q...

“And that’s not all. Somers is dead too … He poisoned himself … in the lounge!”When the wealthy Cosmo Revere is killed by a falling tree, ex-CID officer John Franklin and Ludovic Travers chance to be staying in the vicinity. After examining the scene Franklin determines it was no accident. At the family lawyer’s request Franklin and Travers go undercover at Fenwold Hall, where the dramatis personae, among others, include a bewitching niece, a blustering colonel, a...

Whoever was driving that car was either drunk or mad.The Case of the Flowery Corpse takes Ludovic Travers to the English rural idyll of Marstead in Suffolk, visiting his old friend Henry Morle. The quiet village seems hardly the place for mystery. Yet, following a car crash, a blackmail case emerges – and worse, not one, but two murders. There are multiple suspects, including a pair of twin doctors and a femme fatale, not to mention the looming presence of a US Ar...

Between the acting of a dreadful thing, and the first motion...Ludovic Travers sees it happen. He sees a strange young woman assault Clement Foorde, and all because he had expressed his dislike for a certain best-selling novel. Is it a publicity stunt? The matter escapes Travers’s mind until he hears on the radio one night that the author of the novel in question has been drowned. Everyone, including the police, thinks the affair to be no more than a tragic accident; every...

We’ve got to have a body.That’s what what detective Ludovic Travers says, after being contacted by one Lord Tynworth. Tynworth’s wife has vanished and his lordship wants her found – yet strangely doesn’t seem especially keen on getting her back. When Travers walks into the case, he enters a hall of mirrors. In it are thoroughbred horses, their trainers, at least one man determined not to tell the truth . . . and a burnt corpse.The missing woman is a former crooner,...