“Good God!” I was staring like a lunatic. “Murdered, you say? When?”“Less than half an hour ago, sir.”TRAVERS: “I don’t know why I should call this case that of the Magic Mirror for there’s nothing in it reminiscent of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” even if the mirror did do a certain amount of magical revelation.“As a matter of fact the title is my obstinate own. In the first place, of the many murder cases with which I have been officially co...

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...

“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 ...

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,...

Travers turned to Wharton. “I ask you, George, as a man of the world—do schoolmasters and mistresses have souls full of glamour and passion and intrigue? Are they torn by the same emotions that rend people like us?”At first the old schoolmaster’s poisoning was judged a suicide. But there were too many suspicious circumstances to satisfy Inspector Wharton of Scotland Yard. Why, for instance, had the dead man clung to a large book as he expired? And where is Flint, the schoo...

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...

‘I judge him to have been dead just about twenty-four hours. Suicide, almost certainly.’Ludovic Travers polished his eyeglasses. Inspector Wharton grunted—sure signs of impending mystery. And they were right.The car took the wrong turning and landed them in double murder dressed as suicide. In one room, made up for her principal success, Mary Tudor, was Mary Legreye—poisoned on her throne. In the next, the handyman—dead on the floor. Nothing initially just...

“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...

I am going to commit a murder. I offer no apology for the curtness of the statement.An individual taking the name ‘Marius’ boasts in a series of letters that he will commit the Perfect Murder, daring Scotland Yard detectives to catch him if they can. Ex-CID officer John Franklin and the amateur but astute detective Ludovic Travers will need to draw conclusons from a soiled letter, a locked room murder, four cast-iron alibis, and trips to France, in a feverish search for th...

That happened to be the last that either of us actually saw of Alysia Rimmell—alive.Ludovic Travers, associate of Scotland Yard, and the director of his own detective agency, is brought into a new case, and finds something very much wrong with an attempt at blackmail, an unsolved theft, and a murder . . . they all seem to link up. The more he studies them the more he is convinced that the diamonds from an elaborate pendant Russian Cross are the root of the whole business, ...

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...

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...