Ngaio Marsh’s bestselling and ingenious third novel remains one of the most popular pieces of crime fiction of all time.Sir John Phillips, the Harley Street surgeon, and his beautiful nurse Jane Harden are almost too nervous to operate. The emergency case on the table before them is the Home Secretary – and they both have very good, personal reasons to wish him dead.Within hours he does die, although the operation itself was a complete success, and Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn must find out why…
Commemorating 75 years since the Empress of Crime’s first book, the first volume of the 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries.Sir Hubert Handesley's extravagant weekend house-parties are deservedly famous for his exciting Murder Game. But when the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse with a real dagger in the back. All seven suspects have skilful alibis – so Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn has to figure out the whodunit…
A series of Ngaio Marsh editions concludes with an edition of her autobiography.With all the insight and style her readers came to expect of her, Ngaio Marsh's autobiography captures all the joys, fears and hopes of a spirited young woman growing up in Christchurch, and charts her theatre and writing careers both in New Zealand and the UK. This sanguine, unpretentious and revealing book has been acclaimed for telling her most distinguished mystery – who was Ngaio Marsh?
The restoration of a bombed-out London theatre ends in violent death – and one of Marsh’s most vivid and dramatic novels.When the bombed-out Dolphin Theatre is given to Peregrine Jay by a mysterious wealthy patron, he is overjoyed. And when the mysterious oil millionaire also gives him a glove that belonged to Shakespeare, Peregrine displays it in the dockside theatre and writes a successful play about it.But then a murder takes place, a boy is attacked, the glove is stolen. Could it be that oil and water don’t mix? Inspector Roderick Alleyn is determined to find out…
As detective Paul Temple turns his hand to playwright, his leading lady Iris Archer pulls out shortly before the play is due to open and declares that she is heading for France.However, shortly after her disappearance Paul Temple receives a guest at his Scottish holiday home – none other than that of Iris Archer.The mystery deepens as Temple is asked by a young man to act as postmaster in delivering a letter. Meanwhile someone acting under the codename of Z4 seems to have control of events. Could this be Doctor Steiner, and just who is he? It is all up to Temple . . .
In the dead of night, a watchman is brutally attacked and with his dying breath cries out, “The Green Finger!” It is the latest in a series of robberies to take place that have left Scotland Yard mystified, and with no other choice but to call upon the expertise of Detective Paul Temple.Aided by the beautiful journalist Louise Harvey – affectionately known as Steve – the duo discover that this is not the first victim to warn of the dangerous and elusive ‘Green Finger’… who or what is it? The pair must work together to solve the deepening mystery.
Ngaio Marsh returns to her New Zealand roots to transplant the classic country house murder mystery to an upland sheep station on South Island – and produces one of her most exotic and intriguing novels.One summer evening in 1942 Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband’s wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech – and disappears.Three weeks later she turns up at an auction – packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead…
A man returns from the dead, and the body of a mysterious stranger is found in his room…A few weeks after marrying an attractive young widow, Gordon Cloade is tragically killed by a bomb blast in the London blitz. Overnight, the former Mrs Underhay finds herself in sole possession of the Cloade family fortune.Shortly afterwards, Hercule Poirot receives a visit from the dead man’s sister-in-law who claims she has been warned by ‘spirits’ that Mrs Underhay’s first husband is still alive. Poirot has his suspicions when he is asked to find a missing person guided only by the spirit world. Yet what mystifies Poirot most is the woman’s true motive for approaching him…
Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong.Trent’s Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth as they probe ever deeper in search of a solution to a mystery filled with odd, mysterious twists and turns.Called by Agatha Christie «one of the best detective stories ever written,» Trent's Last Case delights with its flesh-and-blood characters, its naturalness and easy humor, and its style, which, as Dorothy Sayers has noted, «ranges from a vividly coloured rhetoric to a delicate and ironical literary fancy.»
An old-fashioned London Hotel is not quite as reputable as it makes out…When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer.Yet, not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day…