British Library Crime Classics

Welworth Garden City in the 1940s is a forward-thinking town where free spirits find a home - vegetarians, socialists, and an array of exotic religious groups. Chief among these are the Children of Osiris, led by the eccentric High Prophet, Eustace K. Mildmann. The cult is a seething hotbed of petty resentment, jealousy and dark secrets - which eventually lead to murder. The stage is set for one of Inspector Meredith's most bizarre and exacting cases.

Vivian Lestrange - celebrated author of the popular mystery novel The Charterhouse Case and total recluse - has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth. Reported missing by his secretary Eleanor, whom Inspector Bond suspects to be the author herself looking for publicity, it appears that crime is 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 fictional victim.

The stories in this collection will dredge up delight in crime fiction fans, as watery graves claim unsuspecting victims on the sands of an estuary and disembodied whispers penetrate the sleeping quarters of a ship's captain. This British Library anthology collects the best mysteries set on choppy seas, along snaking rivers and even in the supposed safety of a swimming pool, including stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, C. S. Forester, Phyllis Bentley and R. Austin Freeman.

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students and bad publicity for the college. So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of undergraduates meets by the river on a gloomy January afternoon only to find the drowned body of the college bursar floating in her canoe.

When Professor Julius Arnell breathes his last in the British Museum Reading Room, it looks like death from natural causes. Who, after all, would have cause to murder a retired academic? 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 a Texan oil millionaire. Soon another man plunges hundreds of feet into a reservoir on a Yorkshire moor.

Impossible crime stories have delighted people since the invention of detective fiction as puzzle-lovers sought more cerebral entertainment. Following on from Miraculous Mysteries, CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards brings together a whole new casebook of mystifying locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Featuring more great stories by John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons and Margery Allingham alongside newly rediscovered writers, this selection of stories will bring you more insight into one of the most celebrated and dazzling sub-genres of detective fiction.

In 1913 John Farringdale, with his cousin Eric Foster, visits the famous archaeologist Tolgen Reisby. At Scarweather - Reisby's lonely house on the windswept northern coast of England - Eric is quickly attracted to Reisby's much younger wife, and matters soon take a dangerous turn. Fifteen years later the final scene of the drama is enacted.

In the seeming tranquility of Regency Square in Cheltenham live the diverse inhabitants of its 10 houses. One summer's evening the square's rivalries and allegiances are disrupted by a sudden and unusual death - an arrow to the head, shot through an open window at no. 6. Unfortunately for the murderer, an invitation to visit had just been sent by the crime writer Aldous Barnet, staying with his sister at no. 8, to his friend Superintendent Meredith.

Hugh Everton was intent on nothing more than quietly drinking in the second-rate hotel he found himself in on England's south coast—and then in walked his old flame Lucy and her new husband and ex-Judge, Gregory Bath. Entreated by Lucy to join her party for an evening back at the Bath residence, Hugh is powerless to resist, but when the night ends with the judge's inexplicable murder he is pitched back into a world of chaos and crime—a world he had tried to escape for good.

As the thick, autumnal fog chokes the capital, within the fire-lit lounge of London's notorious Brimstone Club a bizarre tale is being spun for Inspector Bencolin and his friend Jeff Marle. A member of the club has been sent a model of a tiny gallows, and the word is that the folkloric hangman Jack Ketch has been stalking the streets for victims by night. The threat of this supposed bogeyman becomes thrillingly real when that same night Bencolin and Marle are almost run down by a limousine with a corpse behind the wheel.

Spirited, beautiful, and thoroughly unconventional, Prudence Pinsent is a remarkable young woman. One fine morning she sets out for Suffolk to join her cousin Lord Wellende for a few days hunting. On the way Prudence encounters Captain Studde of the coastguard who is pursuing a quarry of his own. Studde is on the trail of a drug smuggling ring that connects Wellende Hall with the cloistered world of Cambridge.

Luke flung the light of his torch full onto the face of the immobile figure. Then he had the shock of his life. The man had no face! Where his face should have been was a sort of inhuman, uniform blank! When a body is found at an isolated garage, Inspector Meredith is drawn into a complex investigation where every clue leads to another puzzle: was this a suicide or something more sinister? Why was the dead man planning to flee the country?

Girls Together magazine agony-aunt 'Mrs Friendly-wise', aka Katinka Jones, finds herself at a loose end in Swansea, and decides to pay a surprise visit to one of the magazine's regular correspondents, 'Amista'. But reaching the address – a strange house perched atop a mountain which matches all the descriptions in the letters – nobody has even heard of 'Amista'. As Katinka begins to fall for the dashing master of the house, Carleon, more strange mysteries emerge and the plucky Detective Inspector Chucky joins the search for the truth in this self-consciously lurid mystery-melodrama.

Owen Bradwell is a courageous naval officer who returns to England in the 1930s. He believes that his career is over because he has become colour-blind – but with Nazi Germany an increasing menace, the authorities cannot do without Bradwell, and he is assigned a special mission.

A former acquaintance of Bradwell's has been trapped into betraying his country's secrets by a Nazi agent. Bradwell is sent to spy on the spy, and travels down the Thames on a surveillance trip. Things soon take an unexpected turn, and Bradwell finds himself in the company of a dead man, and a pretty young interior decorator called Sally. Will Bradwell triumph over the villains, and will he and Sally fall in love?

When Dr Raymond Ferens moves to a practice at Milham in the Moor in north Devon, he and his wife are enchanted with the beautiful hilltop village lying so close to moor and sky. At first they see only its charm, but soon they begin to uncover its secrets - envy, hatred and malice. Everyone says that Sister Monica, warden of a children's home, is a saint - but is she? A few months after the Ferens' arrival her body is found drowned in the mill-race. Chief Inspector Macdonald faces one of his most difficult cases in a village determined not to betray its dark secrets to a stranger.

Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. Each December, Adrian Gray invites his extended family to stay at his lonely house, King's Poplars. None of Gray's six surviving children is fond of him; several have cause to wish him dead. The family gathers on Christmas Eve - and by the following morning, their wish has been granted.

The newly formed Ministry of Fine Arts has a staffing problem - one minister dead within six months of its inception, his successor snuffed out shortly before the General Election. When a third victim, Permanent Secretary Edwin Pompfret is fatally crushed by the fall of a giant bust, Inspector Julian Rivers is drawn into a case of murder of artistic devilment.

When Bobbie Cheldon falls in love with a pretty young dancer at the Frozen Fang night club, he has every hope of an idyllic marriage. But Nancy has more worldly ideas about her future: She is attracted not so much to Bobbie as to the fortune he expects to inherit. Bobbie's miserly uncle Massy stands between him and happiness: Massy will not relinquish the $10,000 a year on which Nancy's hopes rest.

The murder, a brutal stabbing, definitely took place on Guy Fawkes night. It was definitely by the bonfire on the village green. There were definitely a number of witnesses to a row between a group of Teddy Boys. And yet, was it definitely clear to anybody exactly what they had seen? In the writhing, violent shadows, it seems as if the truth may have gone up in smoke.

When a counterfeit currency racket comes to light on the French Riviera, Detective Inspector Meredith is sent speeding southwards out of the London murk to the warmth and glitter of the Mediterranean. Along with Inspector Blampignon, an amiable policeman from Nice, Meredith must trace the whereabouts of Chalky Cobbett, crook and forger.