This anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together
18 tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in
book form, including uncollected stories by Ngaio Marsh and John Dickson
Carr.
The Golden Age of detective fiction had begun inauspiciously with the
publication of E.C. Bentley's schismatic Trent's Last Case in 1913,
but it hit its stride in 1920 when both Agatha Christie and Freeman
Wills Crofts - latterly crowned queen and king of the genre - had crime
novels published for the first time. They ushered in two decades of
exemplary mystery writing, the era of the whodunit, the impossible crime
and the locked-room mystery, with stories that have thrilled and baffled
generations of readers.
This new volume in the Bodies from the Library series features the
work of 18 prolific authors who, like Christie and Crofts, saw their
popularity soar during the Golden Age. Aside from novels, they all wrote
short fiction - stories, serials and plays - and although most of them
have been collected in books over the last 100 years, here are the ones
that got away...
In this book you will encounter classic series detectives including
Colonel Gore, Roger Sheringham, Hildegarde Withers and Henri Bencolin;
Hercule Poirot solves 'The Incident of the Dog's Ball'; Roderick Alleyn
returns to New Zealand in a recently discovered television drama by
Ngaio Marsh; and Dorothy L. Sayers' chilling 'The House of the Poplars'
is published for the first time.
With a full-length novella by John Dickson Carr and an unpublished radio
script by Cyril Hare, this diverse collection concludes with some early
'flash fiction' commissioned by Collins' Crime Club in 1938. Each mini
story had to feature an orange, resulting in six very different tales
from Peter Cheyney, Ethel Lina White, David Hume, Nicholas Blake, John
Rhode and - in his only foray into writing detective fiction - the
publisher himself, William Collins.
