Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins" in Traditional Detectives

The first in a new series of classic detective stories from the vaults of HarperCollins is the world’s first locked-room mystery, a seemingly impossible crime story as powerful as any that have copied the scenario since. “The Detective Story Club”, launched by Collins in 1929, was a...

The first in a new series of classic detective stories from the vaults of HarperCollins involves a disappearing corpse, a supernatural theory, and a genuinely shocking finale. “The Detective Story Club”, launched by Collins in 1929, was a clearing house for the best and most ingenious crime...

The next time you visit Olympia, take a good look around and see if you think it would be possible to murder someone in the middle of the crowd there without being seen. The new Comet was fully expected to be the sensation of the annual Motor Show at Olympia. Suddenly, in the middle of the dense...

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the third standalone novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’. Seymour Merriman’s holiday in France comes to an abrupt halt when his motorcycle starts leaking petrol. Following a lorry to find fuel, he discovers that...

A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time on digital audio, performed by Christopher Lee. In this supernatural tale by the Queen of Crime, a nun has memories of a past-life in an ancient civilisation and believes she can harness natural psychic...

A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time on digital audio, performed by Christopher Lee. A medium agrees to perform one last seance before retiring. But even she could not have anticipated the chain of events that it...

A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time on digital audio, performed by Christopher Lee. A man confides in a friend that he has a fear of gypsies stemming from childhood nightmares. When he sees a gypsy in a red scarf he becomes unhinged. Encapsulated in...

Ben the tramp is back at sea, a stowaway bound for Spain in the company of a wanted man – the Hammersmith murderer. Ben, wandering hungry through the foggy back alleys of Limehouse, is spooked by news of an old man murdered in Hammersmith – and runs! He crosses a plank, slips through an iron...

Ben the tramp, the awkward Cockney with no home and no surname, turns detective again – and runs straight into trouble. Ben encounters a dead man on a London bridge and is promptly rescued from the same fate by a posh lady in a limousine. But like most posh ladies of Ben’s acquaintance, this...

Monsieur Lecoq of the French Sûreté is called to investigate a Bank Robbery in one of the world’s first detective novels, widely credited as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. A sensational bank robbery of 350,000 francs is the talk of Paris, with suspicion falling immediately upon Prosper...

A fast-moving, stunning standalone psychological thriller – from the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series Wolf Hadda has lead a charmed life. From humble origins as a woodcutter’s son, he has risen to become a hugely successful entrepreneur, happily married to the girl of...

Set in the 12th century, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, Ivanhoe tells of the love of Wilfred of Ivanhoe for the Lady Rowena, his father Cedric’s ward. Cedric intends Rowena for the oafish Athelstane, and banishes his son. 'The love of battle is the food upon which we live – the...

‘Now he found out a new thing – namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.’ An idyllic snapshot of a boy’s childhood along the banks of the Mississippi River, Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the...

'Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.' A tale of sin, punishment and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as...

Read by the inimitable Christopher Lee are four tales from the great detective’s case book, including bones that won’t stay buried and an exotic South American vampire. In these four tales from his case book, we find the great detective summoned to investigate mysterious bones which just...

A compulsively readable thriller that skillfully weaves together past and present to uncover the sinister secrets buried in the ancient stone quarries under Bath. Kit Parry is reluctant to take the job shoring up the ancient quarries beneath her hometown of Bath – a place as riddled with...

The story of weaver Silas Marner, wrongly cast out of his religious community, who finds a reason for living when, one winter night, a little girl wanders into his cottage out of the snow. ‘Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there...

‘One thing is certain, – that there is a mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dis irae coming on, sooner or later.’ Viewed by many as fuelling the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and laying the groundwork for the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental and...

Another Wexford mystery read by George Baker She was a wonderful, lovely lady, according to her niece. But Gwen Robinson had died in a bleak, underground carpark, murdered by someone who knew just how to use a garrotte. But was she the intended victim? Or had Gwen died of mistaken identity? Mike...

‘The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.’ At the peak of European Imperialism, steamboat captain Charles Marlow travels deep into the...