The most famous of all locked-room mysteries - a classic in the crime genre.If you like the new KNIVES OUT film WAKE UP DEAD MAN you'll love this!***'***The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight' Daily Mail'A key influence on WAKE UP DEAD MAN' Radio Times'The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of...

When a spiritual medium is murdered in a locked hut on a haunted estate, Sir Henry Merrivale seeks a logical solution to a ghostly crime.Plague Court is old and crumbling, long neglected after its lord, hangman's assistant Louis Playge, fell victim to the black death hundreds of years before. Famously haunted by Playge's ghost, the property finally has a new owner and banishing the spirit is the first order of business. And when the medium employed with this task is...

Death and tennis meet in one of impossible crime master John Dickson Carr's most memorable cases.John Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots, in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation, concealing clues as to how the murder was committed and how the body arrived in its current setting.Among all of Carr’s ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of his best known: a dead man is foun...

In this mystery by the acclaimed author of To Wake the Dead, an inheritance hangs in the balance in a case of stolen identities, imposters, and murder.Banished from the idyllic English countryside he once called home and en route to live with his cousin in America, Sir John Farnleigh, black sheep of the wealthy Farnleigh clan, nearly perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Though he survived the catastrophe, his ties with his family did not, and he...

When the police arrive at the holiday bungalow of the haughty Justice Ireton to find a man killed by gunshot and the high court judge brandishing a pistol, the case seems as straightforward as it is scandalous. Yet, with the incongruous assemblage of physical evidence, the judge's denial of any participation in the crime and the recent events of his daughter's love life combined, the deceptively simple case is soon steeped in complexity. At a loss in the bizarre circumstances, the local fo...

Dick Darwent brooded in a dark cell of Newgate Prison - waiting to be hanged. Lady Caroline Ross, rich, cold and beautiful, prepared a champagne breakfast to celebrate her marriage. How were the fates of these two people intertwined? And how were their lives changed by a shot through a bathroom window, a riot at the opera, a pistol duel at dawn, and a mysterious coachman whose cloak was stained with graveyard mold?

A corpse in a top hat leads Dr. Gideon Fell to a killer with a sick sense of humor in this mystery by the celebrated author of Hag's Nook.At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people―but is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing a lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, the manuscript of which has just disappeared from the collection of Si...

The scene is a fashionable French seaside resort; the witness, Eve Neill, is looking out of her window in the early hours of the morning when she sees the battered body of her prospective father-in-law in the room opposite.By Eve's side is her ex-husband, who has attempted to force his unwelcome attentions on her. How can Eve tell the police what she saw when disclosing whom she was with might jeopardise her own impending marriage?Suspicion falls on casual thieves, on the f...

A suspicious death has the hallmarks of witchcraft in this locked room mystery by a master of the genre.When Edward Stevens, an editor at Herald and Son's publishing house, learns of the mysterious events that befell his neighbor's rich uncle, he shrugs off their seemingly supernatural circumstances. He's a logical man and doesn't give much credence to claims of a ghostly figure visiting the man before his death, or the witch's ladder discovered under his pillow af...

From the archives of the British Library, the master of locked-room mystery John Dickson Carr presents an atmospheric and haunting example of crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder.Alison has been murdered. But his blazing body was seen running about the battlements of Castle Skull.And so a dark shadow looms over the Rhineland where Inspector Henri Bencolin and his accomplice Jeff Marle have arrived from Paris. Entreated by the B...

As the thick, autumnal fog chokes the capital, within the fire-lit lounge of London's notorious Brimstone Club a bizarre tale is being spun for Inspector Bencolin and his friend Jeff Marle. A member of the club has been sent a model of a tiny gallows, and the word is that the folkloric hangman Jack Ketch has been stalking the streets for victims by night. The threat of this supposed bogeyman becomes thrillingly real when that same night Bencolin and Marle are almost run down by a limousine...

Christopher Kent, worth a quarter of a million pounds yet without a penny in his pocket, stands hungrily in Piccadilly one snowy morning, looking up at the huge hotel, when a piece of card bearing a number floats down to him. He enters and is served with breakfast, giving the waiter the room number. Then an unlucky chance compels him to go up to room 707. Inside a woman lies murdered in a trunk.Kent needs to prove his innocence fast, and calls in Dr Gideon Fell to investigate - but...