"The murder is by arsenic; and although the number of suspects is strictly limited the construction is so ingenious that to attain the correct solution of the problem requires all the reader's concentration; to skip is fatal." Times Literary Supplement, 1938John Waterhouse has died of some gastric complication. Exhumed at his brother's request, it transpires that he has been killed by arsenical poisoning, though nobody in the sleepy village of Anneypenny seems to have had a reason ...

Republished for the first time in nearly 95 years, a classic winter country house mystery by the founder of the Detection Club, with a twist that even Agatha Christie couldn’t solve!Stephen Munro, a demobbed army officer, reconciles himself to taking a job as a footman to make ends meet. Employed at Wintringham Hall, the delightful but decaying Sussex country residence of the elderly Lady Susan Carey, his first task entails welcoming her eccentric guests to a weeke...

The noted amateur detective Roger Sheringham has formed his own private club of criminologists. As a challenge, he proposes that they individually attempt to solve a murder that has baffled Scotland Yard: the death of wealthy businessman Graham Bendix's wife after he presented her a box of poisoned chocolates.Rather than converging on a single criminal, each of the six members of the Crimes Circle arrives at a completely different solution to the same murder.Anthony Berkele...

Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and nine other writers from the legendary Detection Club collaborate in this fiendishly clever but forgotten crime novel first published 80 years ago.Inspector Rudge does not encounter many cases of murder in the sleepy seaside town of Whynmouth. But when an old sailor lands a rowing boat containing a fresh corpse with a stab wound to the chest, the Inspector's investigation immediately comes up against several obstacles. The vica...

This new edition, which is reproduced from a first printing of the book, is introduced by the author Martin Edwards, archivist of the Detection Club, and includes a never-before-published Preface by Agatha Christie, ‘Detective Writers in England’, in which she discusses her fellow writers in the Detection Club.Lord Comstock is a barbarous newspaper tycoon with enemies in high places. His murder in the study of his country houseposes a dilemma for the Home Secretary. In the hours be...

William, the gardener at Layton Court, was a man of melancholy deliberation. It did not pay, William held, to rush things; especially the important things of life, such as the removal of greenfly from roses. Before action was taken, the matter should be studied, carefully and unhappily, from every possible point of view, particularly the worst. On this summer’s morning William had been gazing despondently at the roses for just over three quarters of an hour. Pretty soon now he would feel h...

"Detection and crime at its wittiest—all Berkeley's stories are amusing, intriguing and he is a master of the final twist." —Agatha ChristieIn this classic Golden Age British mystery, Anthony Berkeley—the renowned author of the Roger Sheringham series—delivers a tense political thriller that starts with a shocking assassination . . .The House of Commons has been breached in the most unthinkable manner. In the middle of his speech introducing a controversial...

In this brilliantly unconventional British mystery, a buried body and a novelist's manuscript intertwine, turning fiction into fatal fact. Literary clues and eccentric suspects collide in a tale perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and British Library Crime Classics.When a young couple uncovers a corpse beneath their new London home, Scotland Yard is stumped. Enter Roger Sheringham: novelist, amateur sleuth, and reluctant schoolteacher. While posing as a...

"A witty and tricky plot and a genuinely shocking conclusion."—Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewA mystery dinner theater party thrown by local author with a taste "for rather gruesome humor" requires guests come dressed as infamous killers—Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen, and the like. Whatever could go wrong?Know-it-all amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham settles in for an evening of beer, small talk, and analyzing his companions....

One of the earliest psychological crime novels.Mrs Bentley has been arrested for murder. The evidence is overwhelming: arsenic she extracted from fly papers was in her husband’s medicine, his food and his lemonade, and her crimes are being plastered across the newspapers. Even her lawyers believe she is guilty. But Roger Sheringham, the brilliant but outspoken young novelist, is convinced that there is ‘too much evidence’ against Mrs Bentley and sets out to prove h...

A classic Golden Age crime novel, and one of the first to feature a serial killer.Investigating the disappearance of a vicar’s daughter in London, the popular novelist and amateur detective Roger Sheringham is shocked to discover that the girl is already dead, found hanging from a screw by her own silk stocking. Reports of similar deaths across the capital strengthen his conviction that this is no suicide cult but the work of a homicidal maniac out for vengeance – ...

As the novel opens, the sparkling and witty Roger Sheringham has been asked by the Daily Courier to visit Hampshire to report on an apparent murder in the small seaside town of Ludmouth Bay. With him he takes his cousin Anthony Walton. "Although there were more than ten years between the cousins (Roger was now thirty-six, Anthony a bare twenty-five), they had always been good friends, and that also in spite of the fact that they had scarcely a taste or a feeling in common." The two of them...