Detective Club Crime Classics – serie

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 it belongs to an English company making timber pit-props for coal mines back home. His suspicions of illegal activity are aroused when he sees the exact same lorry with a different number plate – and confirmed later with the shocking discovery of a body. What began as amateur detective work ends up as a job for Inspector Willis of Scotland Yard, a job requiring tenacity, ingenuity and guile . . .Freeman Wills Crofts’ transition from civil engineer on the Irish railways to world-renowned master of the detective mystery began with The Cask when he was fully 40 years old; but it was his third novel, the baffling The Pit-Prop Syndicate, that was singled out by his editors in 1930 as the first for inclusion in Collins’ prestigious new series of reprints ‘for crime connoisseurs’.This Detective Club classic is introduced by John Curran, author of The Hooded Gunman, and includes the bonus of an exclusive short story by Crofts, ‘Danger in Shroude Valley’.

This exciting thriller by the late Frank Froest, himself a detective of international fame, will satisfy the most exacting of detective story connoisseurs. Against a familiar London background we have here a tale of breath-taking adventure – knifing, arson, racing-taxicabs, and shooting-to-kill.Lost in a London fog, young Jimmie Hallett is accosted by a frightened woman who hands him a package and flees. Within hours, he is being questioned about the murder of the girl’s father and a dangerous international conspiracy. Can genial detective Weir Menzies, even with all the resources of Scotland Yard behind him, succeed in outwitting a faceless gang of organised thieves and killers?Frank Froëst, the highly decorated Superintendent of Scotland Yard’s C.I.D., began his retirement from the Metropolitan Police by writing The Grell Mystery, acclaimed as the first crime novel to incorporate authentic police procedures. With George Dilnot, co-author of the story collection The Crime Club, Froëst wrote one more novel, the ambitious and thrilling The Rogues’ Syndicate, published in 1916 and also released as a silent movie, Millionaire Hallet’s Adventure. The book was republished in April 1930 by the Detective Story Club, but was inadvertently sourced from an abridged, Americanised version called The Maelstrom.This Detective Club classic restores the full text of the British first edition, and includes an introduction by the Detective Story Club’s original series editor, F. T. Smith.(This book is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED, despite what some retailers have put in their listings.)

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the forgotten second novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’.When the body of Sir William Ponson is found in the Cranshaw River near his home of Luce Manor, it is assumed to be an accident – until the evidence points to murder. Inspector Tanner of Scotland Yard discovers that those who would benefit most from Sir William’s death seem to have unbreakable alibis, and a mysterious fifth man whose footprints were found at the crime scene is nowhere to be found . . .This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by Dolores Gordon-Smith, author of the Jack Haldean Golden Age mysteries.

This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the seminal first novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’ and recognised as one of the ‘big four’ Golden Age crime authors.The unloading of a consignment of French wine from the steamship Bullfinch is interrupted by a gruesome discovery in a broken cask leaking sawdust and gold sovereigns. But when the shipping clerk returns with the police, the cask and its macabre contents have gone. Following the clues to Paris, Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard enlists the help of the genial French detective M. Lefarge to check motives and alibis in their hunt for evidence of a particularly fiendish murder.This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by Freeman Wills Crofts himself in a unique preface from 1946 about The Cask’s origins.

From a murder in South Africa to the tracking down of a master criminal in northern Scotland, this is a true classic of Golden Age detective fiction by one of its most accomplished champions.When a signalman discovers a mutilated body inside a railway tunnel near Groote Park, it seems to be a straightforward case of a man struck by a passing train. But Inspector Vandam of the Middeldorp police isn’t satisfied that Albert Smith’s death was accidental, and he sets out to prove foul play in a baffling mystery which crosses continents from deepest South Africa to the wilds of northern Scotland, where an almost identical crime appears to have been perpetrated.The Groote Park Murder was the last of Freeman Wills Crofts’ standalone crime novels, foreshadowing his iconic Inspector French series and helping to cement his reputation (according to his publishers) as ‘the greatest and most popular detective writer in the world’. Like The Cask, The Ponson Case and The Pit-Prop Syndicate before it, here were a delightfully ingenious plot, impeccable handling of detail, and an overwhelming surprise ‘curtain’ from a masterful crime writer on the cusp of global success.This Detective Club classic is introduced with an essay by Freeman Wills Crofts, unseen since 1937, about ‘The Writing of a Detective Novel’.

The Skeleton Key (1919) was the first detective novel published by Collins, ushering in the Golden Age, the Crime Club, and 100 years of remarkable crime fiction that would follow.A body is discovered after a shooting party in the grounds of a country house in Hampshire. The police are called in, and a clever young detective, Sergeant Ridgway, begins to unravel a much more complicated and brutal case of murder than was first suspected. But has he met his match with Le Sage, a chess-playing Baron, who is convinced that the answers lie not in Hampshire but in Paris?After 20 years of writing in various genres, The Skeleton Key was Bernard Capes’ crowning achievement, as he died shortly after completing the book. Introduced by Hugh Lamb, whose anthology The Black Reaper resurrected Capes’ reputation as one of the best horror writers of his generation, the book also includes its original tribute to Capes by G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries.