British Library Classics

On the eve of Elaine Southey's 21st birthday, Ivan Sweet has been found dead in his flat in the basement of the Southeys' historic north London home. A slick charmer to some of the tenants and a loathsome young scoundrel to others, his death doesn't draw out many tears among the house's residents and neighbours. And yet the sordid truth starts to seep into the heart of their small community. A murderer is living among them, and who's to say when they might strike again?

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?

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 into 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 will gladly cut you for a first edition and then offer you a lift home afterwards.

A playwright is murdered, seemingly in connection with the suspected blackmail of his friend—a rising young MP who, without explanation, disappeared from public view before his untimely death. With a number of high-profile suspects to investigate, the key to solving the case rests on a written clue left behind by the killer....

Four men had arranged to fly to Dublin. When their aeroplane descended as a fireball into the Irish Sea, only three of them were on board. With the identities of the passengers lost beneath the waves, a tense and perplexing investigation begins to determine the living from the dead, with scarce evidence to follow beyond a few snippets of overheard conversation and one family’s patchy account of the three days prior to the flight.

In Bloomsbury, London, Inspector Brook of Scotland Yard looks down at a dismal scene. The victim of a ruthless murder lies burnt beyond recognition, his possessions and papers destroyed by fire. But there is one strange, yet promising, lead - a lead which suggests the involvement of a skier. Meanwhile, piercing sunshine beams down on the sparkling snow of the Austrian Alps, where a merry group of holidaymakers are heading towards Lech am Arlberg.

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.

Alberta Mansbridge sets the table with teacups, mulling over the guests who will be arriving within the hour: her accountant and the ex-jailbird Barry; her nephew and his ghastly new wife; the Italian playboy, the family doctor, the manager of her father’s company and dear old Myra, with whom she had so recently fallen out. . . Alberta returns upstairs to get herself ready. Alberta returns upstairs to get herself ready. Yet the guests' knocking goes unanswered, and they soon discover that their host has been murdered - worse still, that the killer must be among them, let in early.

Sarah has been receiving threatening anonymous letters seemingly from a former lover. Just one day after revealing this information to her co-worker Nancy, Sarah is shot and found in her bedroom by one of her past flames, Donald. Desperate to clear any evidence of Donald's presence at the scene for her own infatuations, Nancy finds herself as the key suspect when she is discovered in the apartment. As the real killer uses the situation to their advantage, Bennett crafts a tense and nuanced story through flashbacks to Sarah's life and loves.

Through the double clamour of Big Ben and the shrill sound of the bell rang a revolver shot. A financier is found shot in the House of Commons. Suspecting foul play, Robert West, a parliamentary private secretary, takes on the role of amateur sleuth. Used to turning a blind eye to covert dealings, West must now uncover the shocking secret behind the man's demise, amid distractions from the press and the dead man's enigmatic daughter.

A quiet, enigmatic young woman called Laura Dousland is on trial for murder, accused of poisoning her elderly husband, Fordish Dousland. The couple's Italian servant, Angelo Terugi, chief witness for the prosecution, is on the stand and is also under suspicion. At the heart of the puzzle of Fordish Dousland's death is the Chianti flask that almost certainly held the wine containing the poison which killed him. But the flask has disappeared. The jury delivers its verdict, but this represents simply the 'end of the beginning' of Marie Belloc Lowndes' novel.

The diplomat Sir George Ramsden is returning to Britain from France with the mysterious 'unicorn' in tow. The legendary thief Flamande has declared that he will be on the same flight as Ramsden, in disguise, and that the unicorn will be his. His arch-rival and head of the Sûreté Nationale, Gasquet, has assured the public that he too will be on the plane to thwart his nemesis. Meanwhile, holidaying in Paris, the ex-spy Kenwood Blake runs into Evelyn Cheyne and is swept into a perilous chase ending at the Chateau de l'Île on a stormy night.

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.

East Africa, 1913. The disgraced English aristocrat Everard Dominey stumbles out of the bush and comes face to face with his lookalike, the German Baron von Ragastein. Months later, Dominey returns to London and resumes his glittering social life. But is it really Dominey who has come back - or a German secret agent seeking to infiltrate English high society?

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.

Elderly Mrs Rampage lives alone in a large London house full of the antiques and heirlooms she's collected over the years. But she's struggling to cope, and as her only daughter lives thousands of miles away, she is persuaded to advertise for a housekeeper and companion. Reluctantly, she accepts the courteous and capable Mrs Roach into No. 5 to help her. With few possessions of her own, Mrs Roach is in desperate need of a place to stay, but she soon has her own ideas about how things should be run in the house.

When Douglas B. Douglas - leading light of the London theatre - premiers his new musical extravaganza, Blue Music, he is sure the packed house will be dazzled by the performance. What he couldn't predict is the death of his star, Brandon Baker, onstage in the middle of act two. Soon another member of the cast is found dead, and it seems to be a straightforward case of murder followed by suicide.

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.

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.

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.