Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On a dismally foggy night in Hampstead, London, a curious party has gathered in an artist's studio to weather the wartime blackout A civil servant and a government scientist are matching wits in a game of chess, while an artist paints the portrait of his characterful sitter, bedecked in Cardinal's robes at the other end of the room. In the kitchen, the artist's sister is hosting the charlady of the miser next door. When the brutal murder of said...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
""Now tell us about your crime novel. Take my advice and don't try to be intellectual over it. What the public likes is blood." The Surrays and their five children form a prolific writing machine, with scores of treatises, reviews, and crime thrillers published under their family name. Following a rare convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth-middle sister who writes "books which are just books"- decides to spend some weeks...
Author
Series
British Library crime classics volume 100
Language
English
Description
"An honest policeman, Sergeant Wigan, escorts a drunk man home one night to keep him out of trouble and, seeing his fine book collection, slowly falls in to the gentle art of book collecting. Just as the friendship is blossoming, the policeman's book-collecting friend is murdered. To solve the mystery of why the victim was killed, and which of his rare books was taken, Wigan dives into the world of 'runners' and book collectors, where avid agents...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Tightly paced and cleverly defying the conventions of the classic detective story, this 1933 novel remains a milestone of the inverted mystery subgenre. This edition includes an introduction by CWA Diamond Dagger and Edgar Award-winning author Martin Edwards. At a costume party with the dubious theme of "famous murderers and their victims," the know-it-all amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham is settled in for an evening of beer, small talk, and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In the celebrated author's first mystery novel, Inspector Bencolin must unravel a dumbfounding locked-room mystery and apprehend a sadistic killer. In the smoke-wreathed gloom of a Parisian salon, Bencolin has summoned his allies to discuss a peculiar case. A would-be murderer imprisoned for attempting to kill his wife has escaped and is known to have visited a plastic surgeon. Bencolin predicts his return, and his worst suspicions are realized when...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils in the world: unladylike behavior among her students and bad publicity for the college. This means it's a very, very bad day when a secret society of her students meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon--and finds the drowned body of the college bursar. Death on the Cherwell follows the investigation, which initially focuses on the girls themselves and ultimately...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On a dark November evening, Sir Wilfred Saxonby is travelling alone in the 5 o'clock train from Cannon Street, in a locked compartment. The train slows and stops inside a tunnel; and by the time it emerges again minutes later, Sir Wilfred has been shot dead, his heart pierced by a single bullet. Suicide seems to be the answer, even though no reason can be found. Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard thinks again when he learns that a mysterious red light...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"This addition to the Crime Classics series is an immersive musical mystery, featuring diagrams of the orchestra arrangement and four pages of musical notation with relevance to the plot. First published in 1941 but out-of-print since, this is by a lost writer of the genre, Sebastian Farr (a pseudonym for Eric Walter Blom), a prolific Swiss-born and British-naturalised music lexicographer, music critic and writer. The headline from The Maningpool...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Vivian Lestrange--celebrated author of the popular mystery novel The Charterhouse Case and total recluse--has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth. After he was reported missing by his secretary Eleanor, whom Inspector Bond suspects to be the author herself, crime and murder are afoot when Lestrange's housekeeper is also found to have disappeared. Bond and Warner of Scotland Yard set to work to investigate a murder with no body and a potentially...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Two classic cases featuring Detective Inspector Littlejohn. In the winter of 1940, the Home Guard unearth a skeleton on the moor above the busy town of Hatterworth. Twenty-three years earlier, the body of a young textile worker was found in the same spot, and the prime suspect was never found--but the second body is now identified as his. Soon it becomes clear that the true murderer is still at large... Nathaniel Wall, the local quack doctor, is...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"'The purpose, the illusion, the spirit of a waxworks. It is an atmosphere of death. It is soundless and motionless... Do you see?' Last night Mademoiselle Duchêne was seen heading into the Gallery of Horrors at the Musée Augustin waxworks, alive. Today she was found in the Seine, murdered. The museum's proprietor, long perturbed by the unnatural vitality of his figures, claims that he saw one of them following the victim into the dark--a lead that...
12) Fell murder
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Garths had farmed their fertile acres for generations and fine land it was with the towering hills of the Lake Country on the far horizon. Garthmere Hall itself was old before Flodden Field, and here hot-tempered Robert Garth, still hale and hearty at eighty-two, ruled his household with a rod of iron. When he is killed, Inspector MacDonald sets to work on the close-knit cadre of suspects in this grim story of evil passions and murderous hate...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Jim Teasdale has been drowned in the Dumb River, near Ely, miles from his Yorkshire home. His body, clearly dumped in the usually silent ('dumb') waterway, has been discovered before the killer intended - disturbed by a torrential flood. With critical urgency, it's up to Superintendent Littlejohn of Scotland Yard to trace the mystery of the unassuming victim's murder to its source, leaving waves of scandal and sensation in his wake as the hidden,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Second World War is drawing to a close. Nicholas Vaughan, released from the army after an accident, takes refuge in Devon - renting a thatched cottage in the beautiful countryside at Mallory Fitzjohn. Vaughan sets to work farming the land, rearing geese and renovating the cottage. Hard work and rural peace seem to make this a happy bachelor life. On a nearby farm lives the bored, flirtatious June St Cyres, an exile from London while her husband...
Author
Language
English
Description
"George Furnace, flight instructor at Baston Aero Club, dies instantly when his plane crashes into the English countryside. People who knew him are baffled - Furnace was a first-rate pilot, and the plane was in perfect condition - and the inquest records a verdict of death by misadventure. An Australian visitor to the aero club, Edwin Marriott, Bishop of Cootamundra, suspects that the true story is more complicated. Could this be a dramatic suicide...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"An enigmatic young woman named Laura Dousland stands on trial for murder, accused of poisoning her elderly husband, Fordish. It seems clear that the poison was delivered in a flask of Chianti with supper, but according to the couple's servant in the witness-box, the flask disappeared the night Fordish died, and all attempts to trace it have come to nothing. The jury delivers its verdict, but this is just the end of the beginning of Marie Belloc Lowndes's...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"John Wilkins meets a beautiful, irresistible girl, and his world is turned upside down. Looking at his wife, and thinking of the girl, everything turns red before his eyes--the colour of murder. But did he really commit the heinous crime he was accused of? Told innovatively in two parts: the psychiatric assessment of Wilkins and the trial for suspected murder on the Brighton seafront, Symons' award-winning mystery tantalizes the reader with glimpses...
18) Murder's a swine
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
""I should imagine this was murder, too, because it would be very difficult to build yourself into a heap of sandbags and then die..." In the blackout conditions of a wintry London night, amateur sleuth Agnes Kinghof and a young air-raid warden have stumbled upon a corpse stowed in the walls of their street's bomb shelter. As the police begin their investigation, the night is interrupted once again when Agnes' upstairs neighbour, Mrs. Sibley is terrorised...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"London, 1945. The capital is shrouded in the darkness of the blackout, and mystery abounds in the parks after dusk. During a stroll through Regent's Park, Bruce Mallaig witnesses two men acting suspiciously around a footbridge. In a matter of moments, one of them has been murdered; Mallaig's view of the assailant but a brief glimpse of a ghastly face in the glow of a struck match. The murderer's noiseless approach and escape seems to defy all logic,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
When Professor Julius Arnell breathes his last in the hushed atmosphere of the British Museum Reading Room, it looks like death from natural causes. Who, after all, would have cause to murder a retired academic whose life was devoted to Elizabethan literature? Inspector Shelley's suspicions are aroused when he finds a packet of poisoned sugared almonds in the dead man's pocket; and a motive becomes clearer when he discovers Arnell's connection to...
Search More Libraries
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by SWAN libraries can be requested from other WorldCat libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request