British Library Crime Classics

Amateur thief Ted Lyte has chosen an isolated house by the coast for his first robbery. But Haven House is no ordinary country home. While hunting for silverware to steal, Ted stumbles upon a locked room containing seven dead bodies. Detective Inspector Kendall takes on the case with the help of passing yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean. The search for the house's absent owners takes Hazeldean across the Channel to Boulogne, where he finds more than one motive to stay and investigate.

Lady Wainwright presides over the Gothic gloom at Belting, in mourning for her two sons lost in the Second World War. Long afterwards a stranger arrives at Belting, claiming to be the missing David Wainwright, who was not killed after all but held captive for years in a Russian prison camp. With Lady Wainwright's health fading, her inheritance is at stake, and the family is torn apart by doubts over its mysterious long-lost son. Belting is shadowed by suspicion and intrigue, and then the first body is found.

Widely acknowledged as the first detective novel, this story is narrated by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, who is building a case against the sinister Baron “R**”, suspected of murdering his wife in order to obtain significant life insurance payments. Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue including a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, slow poisoners, a rich uncle’s will and three murders.

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 - or even murder?

Everyone needs a break now and then but sometimes getting away from it all can be murder. Martin Edwards presents a jam-packed travel case of 18 mysteries, featuring short stories from crime legends, such as Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley and Ethel Lina White, alongside more obscure writers revived in this anthology. Grab your ticket for a journey from the classic 1920s seaside holiday to the 1980s homebody’s dream – perfect for an armchair reverie or a summer getaway.

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.

On a sultry afternoon in July, a man stumbles through thick foliage, making for the coast. He wears prisoner's garb and guards are hot on his heels. Happening upon a bather's clothes, the escapee leaves the scene looking the part of the average beachcomber. But it can be hard to stay hidden forever. When a blackmailer intrudes upon the promising life of the man who now calls himself Mr. Pottermack, a violent fate befalls him, and the stakes are set: Pottermack must avoid discovery at all costs to escape the hangman's noose.

In a tranquil Kentish village, Dr Sandys and his wife are preparing for Christmas with their guest, Liane 'Lee' Crauford. Festivities start badly when their party is spoiled by an enigmatic widow new to the village, and the atmosphere hits rock bottom when the pompous local nobleman and ceramic-collector Sir Henry Metcalfe unexpectedly dies. Sensing potential villains among Metcalfe's circle, Lee teams up with Detective-Inspector Hugh Gordon to discover the killer playing merry hell with her holiday in this lost vintage mystery, republished for the first time since 1952.

'There will be ten teacups at number 4, Berwick Terrace, W.8, on Wednesday, July 31st, at 5 p.m. Precisely. The presence of the Metropolitan Police is respectfully requested.' The note was delivered to New Scotland Yard, its words evoking a cold murder case and its unsolved mystery of the ten teacups found beside the body. Scrambling to prevent a second killing, the police set up a watertight cordon at Berwick Terrace. But gunfire rings out from the top floor at 5 p.m.

Behind the stage lights and word-perfect soliloquies, sinister secrets are lurking in the wings. The mysteries in this collection reveal the dark side to theatre and performing arts: a world of backstage dealings, where unscrupulous actors risk everything to land a starring role, costumed figures lead to mistaken identities, and on-stage deaths begin to look a little too convincing. This expertly curated thespian anthology features 14 stories from giants of the classic crime genre.

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.

After battling for justice in his first recorded case, Sergeant Caleb Cluff makes a swift return to duty in this book. The story opens one wet and windy night, with the discovery of a young woman's corpse, in a passageway in the Yorkshire town of Gunnarshaw. The deceased is Jane Trundle, an attractive girl who worked as a shop assistant. She yearned for the good life, and Cluff finds more money in her handbag than she would have earned in wages.

When Miriam Lea falls on hard times, an advertisement calling for private agents catches her eye, and within weeks she finds herself in Mr Bazalgette's employ as a private detective, travelling on a train to Hamburg in pursuit of an audacious fraudster. What follows is a journey through some of the great cities of Europe - and eventually to South Africa - as Miss Lea attempts to find her man.

The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with some of the best authors in the genre taking to the short story form to pit their sleuths against crimes ranging from murders on the Tube to heists from the capital's finest jewellers. Featuring a roster of Scotland Yard's meticulous best, a cohort of daring doctors and a cadre of characterful private investigators, this new selection by Martin Edwards includes 18 vintage mystery stories which showcase the city's most compelling classic cases.

"Already it looked as if the police were up against a carefully planned and cleverly executed murder, and, what was more, a murder without a corpse!” Two brothers, John and William Rother, live together at Chalklands Farm in the beautiful Sussex Downs. Their peaceful rural life is shattered when John Rother disappears and his abandoned car is found. Has he been kidnapped? Or is his disappearance more sinister - connected, perhaps, to his growing rather too friendly with his brother's wife?

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 convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth—the middle sister—decides to spend some weeks there recovering from the pressures of the writing life. Their next return is heralded by the tragic news that Ruth has taken her life after an evening at the Surrays' hosting a set of publishers and writers, one of whom is named as Ruth's literary executor in the will she left behind.

In the peaceful seaside town of Broadgate, an impossible crime occurs. The operator of the cliff railway locks the empty carriage one evening; when he returns to work next morning, a dead body is locked inside - a man who has been stabbed in the back. Jimmy London, a newspaper reporter, is first on the scene. He is quick on the trail for clues and agrees to pool his knowledge with Inspector Shelley of Scotland Yard, who is holidaying in the area.

The British Secret Service, working to uncover a large-scale blackmail ring and catch its mysterious mastermind 'The Spider', find themselves at the country residence Feltham Abbey where a fancy-dress ball is in full swing. In the tumult of revelry, Sir Ralph Feltham is found dead. Not the atmosphere bewildered guest Tony was expecting, he sets out make sense of the night's activities and the motives of the other guests.

When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met instead with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in France years before; the murder of a man on a tower with only one staircase, under watch at the time at which the murder took place. With theories of levitating vampires abounding, the story comes home to Miles when he realises that the librarian he has just hired for his home is none other than Fay Seton, a woman at the heart of this bizarre and unsolved past murder.

It all began with sheep-stealing. A hateful act among the shepherds of the fells, and yet not a matter of life and death. Then came arson and with the leaping of the flames, death and disorder reached the peaceful moors. Holidaying with his friends the Hoggetts in High Gimmerdale while on a trip to find some farmland for his retirement, Robert Macdonald agrees to help in investigating the identity of the sheep-stealers, before being dragged into a case requiring his full experience as Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard.