"This annual anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in book form, including a short novel by Christianna Brand.
Mystery stories have been around for centuries—there are whodunits, whydunits and howdunits, including locked-room puzzles, detective stories without detectives, and crimes with a limited choice of suspects.
Countless volumes of such stories have been published, but some are still impossible to find: stories that appeared in a newspaper, magazine or an anthology that has long been out of print and unpublished stories that were absorbed into an author’s archive when they died . . .
Here for the first time are three never-before-published mysteries by Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh and Leo Bruce. Together with a newly unearthed short story by Ethel Lina White that inspired Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and a complete short novel by Christianna Brand, this diverse mix of tales by some of the world’s most popular classic crime writers contains something for everyone.
Complete with indispensable biographies by Tony Medawar of all the featured authors, the fourth volume in the series Bodies from the Library once again brings into the daylight the forgotten, the lost and the unknown."
"A collection of the BBC’s dramatisations of Ngaio Marsh’s most famous sleuth: Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn.
This collection would include the following works by Ngaio Marsh:
A Man Lay Dead - The gentleman detective tackles a country house party murder.
A Surfeit of Lampreys - Gentleman sleuth Inspector Alleyn probes a grisly death of the head of a spendthrift aristocratic family.
Opening Night - When a leading actor is found gassed in his dressing room, it looks like suicide. But it transpires he was so detested that everyone had a motive for his murder.
When In Rome - 1970s Rome. Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn is incognito and on the trail of a vast drugs syndicate - and some exceptionally unsavoury blackmail. But he hasn't reckoned on murder."
"Roderick Alleyn is back in this unique crime novel begun by Ngaio Marsh during the Second World War and now completed by Stella Duffy in a way that has delighted reviewers and critics alike.
Shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award 2018.
It’s business as usual for Mr Glossop as he does his regular round delivering wages to government buildings scattered across New Zealand’s lonely Canterbury plains. But when his car breaks down he is stranded for the night at the isolated Mount Seager Hospital, with the telephone lines down, a storm on its way and the nearby river about to burst its banks.
Trapped with him at Mount Seager are a group of quarantined soldiers with a serious case of cabin fever, three young employees embroiled in a tense love triangle, a dying elderly man, an elusive patient whose origins remain a mystery … and a potential killer.
When the payroll disappears from a locked safe and the hospital’s death toll starts to rise faster than normal, can the appearance of an English detective working in counterespionage be just a lucky coincidence – or is something more sinister afoot?"
