Possibly the most unusual mystery ever written. A murder is committed, behind closed doors, in bizarre circumstances. Three amateur detectives take the case: Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon, and Monsignor Smith (in whom discerning readers will note likeness to some familiar literary figures). Each arrives at his own brilliant solution, startling in its originality, ironclad in its logic. Meanwhile Sergean Beef sits contemptuously in the background. "But, " says Sergean Beef, "I kn...

Richard Hoysden's body is discovered in his country flat, a revolver beside him, and a bullet through the head, apparently a suicide. Missing from the room is a tape of Hoysden's last moments on which he confesses ti the murder of a young woman. Lady Drombone, a member of Parliament and the dead man's aunt, hires Carolus Deene to help suppress the evidence. He must reconstruct the confusing circumstances in order to solve this baffling crime.

Walking on the sand before breakfast, Carolus Deene's cousin Fay, who was staying on the Suffolk coast, had come upon the head of Lilliane Bomberger, the celebrated and universally detested novelist. The body was buried in the sand with only the head protruding; at least one tide had washed over it. Before this frustrating case ends, three murders are committed. This is vintage Bruce, mixing thrills and chills with unique humor.

The dead bodies of two elderly ladies are discovered; both had been strangled. Each is found lying full-length, clasping in her hand the stem of a Madonna lily.

Another Carolus Deene novel, this mystery in particular is considered one of Bruce's cleverest and best plotted.

Everyone knew there'd been a murder, everyone knew who the murderer was, and when this murderer committed suicide by jumping overboard from the cargo boat Saragossa, they thought "Good riddance." Everyone, that is, except Carolus Deene.

There are strange goings-on at St. Asprey's, an expensive boys' preparatory school: footsteps in passages at night . . . strange lights . . . rabbits with battered skulls. Carolus Deene has some spine-tingling experiences before he solves the mystery.

The dead bodies of two elderly ladies are discovered; both had been strangled. Each is found lying full-length, clasping in her hand the stem of a Madonna lily.

Everyone knew there'd been a murder, everyone knew who the murderer was, and when this murderer committed suicide by jumping overboard from the cargo boat Saragossa, they thought "Good riddance." Everyone, that is, except Carolus Deene.

In a gloomy London suburb, a modern Jack the Ripper stalks at night, killing at random with brutal knife thrusts from behind. Three women fall victim, and the terrorized residents wait to see who will be next.

"Five men occupied their usual places in a first-class carriage, but the sixth place was empty..." It is most unusual for the sixth man, Mr. Parador, to be late. The five commuters are wondering what happened to him, when a strange-looking man enters the compartment, dressed in black and wearing dark glasses. When he is told that the sixth seat is taken, he replies, in a deep sepulchral voice, "He won't be coming." He was right. Parador does not come, and his companions never see him alive...

Billed as "the ugliest case that Carolus Deene ever chose to investigate," Leo Bruce's Death of a Bovver Boy finds the redoubtable schoolmaster-turned-detective involved in yet another mystery murder—this time among teenage outcasts and skinheads in rural 1970s England. When Carolus's housekeeper, stoic Mrs. Stick, announces one evening that her husband has seen the naked body of a youth lying in "a peculiar hunched-up position" in a ditch beside the road, his hair shorn and his wrists sla...