Christopher Bush

Ludovic Travers saw it happen. He saw a strange young woman assault the great Clement Foorde, and all because Foorde had expressed his dislike for a certain best-selling novel. Was it a publicity stunt? Travers wondered, but then the matter went out of his mind until he heard on the radio one night that the author of the novel in question had been drowned in a Sussex river. Everyone, including the police, thought the affair to be no more than a tragic accident; everyone except the dead man's brother, who came to see Travers at the Broad Street Detective Agency with a piece of information that placed the Case of The Silken Petticoat in an entirely new light. Christopher Bush again proves himself a master of the true detective story and provides plenty of hard thinking and fast action before a solution is reached.

The urbane Ludovic Travers is engaged on what seems like a fairly routine assignment-investigating for a client the possibility that his aunt was a victim of the wealthy-widows racket. But as might be expected in anything involving the redoubtable Mr. Travers, the pace quickens and the plot thickens. To the original ring of the puzzle are added two others: blackmail and MURDER. The problem is to put the three rings together and come out with a solution, for they all seem completely separate and unrelated. But rest assured. Christopher Bush, that old master of the genuine detective story, solves the whole affair with his usual grand flourish.

Caterer and small-town minister's wife Faith Fairchild might never have accepted the job teaching a course on Cooking for Idiots at Mansfield Academy had it not been for Daryl Martin. An African-American student at the prestigious prep school, Daryl has lately become the target of a series of vicious and anonymous racial attacks -- and Faith is determined to put an end to the injustice. But Mansfield, she finds, is a seething cauldron of secrets, academic in-fighting, and unspoken rules that complicate her task. When someone tampers with her classroom cooking ingredients -- and then the remains of her prime suspect are discovered smoldering in a campus bonfire -- she realizes that a monstrous evil is stalking both Daryl and the school. And suddenly Faith's own life is in serious jeopardy as well!

>>I am going to commit a murder. I offer no apology for the curtness of the statement. >An individual taking the name ‘Marius’ boasts in a series of letters that he will commit the Perfect Murder, daring Scotland Yard detectives to catch him if they can. Ex-CID officer John Franklin and the amateur but astute detective Ludovic Travers will need to draw conclusons from a soiled letter, a locked room murder, four cast-iron alibis, and trips to France, in a feverish search for the killer and proof of his misdeeds—before ‘Marius’ can strike again. >The Perfect Murder Case was originally published in 1929. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans. >“All the points of the good detective story are here … excitement, ingenuity, suspense, crescendo, and a satisfactory conclusion.” Observer

>“And that’s not all. Somers is dead too.… He poisoned himself … in the lounge!” >When the wealthy Cosmo Revere is killed by a falling tree, ex-C.I.D. officer John Franklin and Ludovic Travers chance to be staying in the vicinity. After examining the scene Franklin determines it was no accident. At the family lawyer’s request Franklin and Travers go undercover at Fenwold Hall, where the dramatis personae, among others, include a bewitching niece, a blustering colonel, and a vicar with a passion for amateur theatricals. Fenwold is a country house beset by secrets … and devious murder. Murder at Fenwold was originally published in 1930.

>The theft of £200 from the family safe might be thought a minor loss to a wealthy jeweller like Karl Morren. Yet when Ludovic Travers of the Broad Street Detective Agency is called in to vet the insurance claim he finds the Morren family gripped by unexplained fear and suspicion. Only six months later diamonds valued at £10,000 are stolen from Morren's office safe, and Travers is convinced that there is more to the situation than meets the eye. >What is the link between these two thefts? What made attractive Cambridge-educated David Wayner turn to crime? How does he come to be involved with the Morren family? And where are the missing diamonds? These are the questions to which Travers and his friend Superintendent Jewle of the Yard have to find the answers, and the trail becomes both suspenseful and occasionally lethal before the case is solved. >Here is a recognised "Old Master" of the detective story at the top of his form.

In the market for a race horse, wealthy, beautiful Isabel Herne settled herself in a Cambridge hotel to be near the Newmarket sales. She had hoped to find a filly. Instead she found a promising young man of great charm. He promised that his name was Edward Gower, and he promised that he, too, was in the market for a filly. Indeed, he knew where an excellent one could be bought on the hush-hush for a good price. And if the flattered and attracted Isabel would give him her check for half the money, he would put up the other half. And then he promised they would go to Yorkshire to meet his titled parents. And then they might even be married. And then he was gone. And so was Isabel's cashed check. And so was the horse. Isabel takes her sad story to her friend the redoubtable Ludovic Travers, head of London's renowned Broad Street Detective Agency. Travers soon finds out that what seemed to be a simple, albeit heartless, case of swindle is merely one layer in a jumbo sandwich of crime-a many-splendored affair that numbers among its chewy charms blackmail, black magic, a black sheep, and murder. And, with customary gusto, he soon reduces it to crumbs after the perilous pursuit of an archcriminal that draws him from the foggy streets of London to a deadly confrontation on a lonely Riviera beach.

A plea from Lady Marport to find her missing seventeen-year-old daughter Beryl, plunges Ludovic Travers into an investigation in the Soho underworld of blackmail, thuggery and murder. By chance too, he solves a daring drug robbery which had taken place some months earlier. Who was the mysterious bearded man whom the missing girl had known the year before and whom Travers suspects may be connected with her disappearance? What was his connection with the Painter Academy and with the man whom Travers meets during the course of his inquiries, whose face was vaguely familiar? And why does Lady Marport suddenly and most surprisingly call a halt to the investigation? These are just a few of the problems which face Ludovic Travers in another masterly story of suspense by Christopher Bush.

It was one of the most bewildering cases that had ever confronted Ludovic Travers and Superintendent George Wharton. The spivs who threatened barmaid Maudie Brown let fall word of a proposed robbery at the bungalow of a famous actress. But the unfortunate actress was submitted to more than robbery — she was murdered. The case became more baffling by the hour. Why, for instance, did Maudie disappear? And why was there a crying baby at the bungalow? What connection was there with a famous clown? And why the odd behaviour of a famous conductor? Travers knew he had to find the answers — fast .

Ludovic Travers #5 >>"However thorough your search was, I'm convinced the murderer, or the burglar - call him what you will - is still in the house." >Little Levington Hall, the site of the seasonal house party in Dancing Death, is owned by Martin Braishe, inventor of a lethal gas. Unfortunately for Braishe and his houseguests, their fancy-dress ball might more accurately be described as a fancy-death ball. After the formal festivities have taken place, nine guests remain at the snowbound Hall, along with a retinue of servants. It is at this point that dead bodies most inconveniently begin to turn up, like so many unwanted Christmas presents. It will be up to the eccentric Ludovic Travers, with his companions John Franklin and Superintendent Wharton of Scotland Yard, to solve this most intricate and ingenious of Yuletide mysteries. Dancing Death was originally published in 1931.

There was something unique about the Case of the Treble Twist. It isn't often one gets a preview of a case or hovers round its fringes four years before it breaks, but that was just what happened here. The preview began the evening Ludovic Travers had a drink with Chief Inspector Jewle, and first heard the name of Harry Tibball, suspect involved in a series of big-scale robberies, Then a few months later Tibball's body was found in a wrecked car not far from a newly burgled house in Bedfordshire. The surviving accomplice was caught and gaoled, but nothing was recovered and nothing more discovered concerning Tibball's past history. Three years went by, and Travers had virtually forgotten the whole business when a pleasant-voiced woman from America rang the Broad Street Agency and asked him to undertake a highly confidential assignment. It proved to be a voice from the past, for it belonged to the daughter of the last man Tibball had robbed.

Ludovic Travers' attention was attracted to the affair of the hanging at Frenchman's Rise by one curious feature — the man who had apparently committed suicide had been shaved after death! More curious still, Travers discovered that after reconstructing the dead man's beard he knew who the victim was. This brought him by devious ways to the musical theme with variations of the mysterious Mr. Rook, who bellowed at a woman who was not deaf and uttered certain strange cliches in his speech.

> Ludovic Travers had never come across a more ingenious fraud - three of them, in fact. All were perpetrated in only twenty-four hours. One was in Liverpool, the second and third in Southampton and London. The same two people, posing as an American married couple, had purchased a diamond ring at each of three jewellery stores, paying for all three with beautifully forged traveller's cheques to the tune of about two thousand pounds. The thieves had then done a highly successful vanishing act. >Shortly after Ludovic Travers is called in on the case, he is diverted from it by the search for a missing heir, one of the twin grandsons of an old friend. The twin on the scene - the Heavenly Twin, Travers calls him - is apparently doing very well. The other has definitely gone wrong, and has also disappeared. >On the missing twin's trail, Travers encounters yet another diversion: a jewel robbery in a country house in Hampshire. And then two more forged cheques turn up. Are they red herrings or pieces of the same puzzle?

Ludovic Travers had received a good many queer requests and enquiries over the phone at the Broad Street Detective Agency, but a psychiatrist in fear of his life and in search of a bodyguard was something new. An appointment was made for the following day, but Travers had barely completed a few discreet enquiries concerning the personal history of his new client when he received another call. This time it was a summons from George Wharton to come to a flat in Chelsea where an artist called Sindle had just been stabbed in the back, and an attempt made to destroy the evidence by burning the body. It looked like a routine matter till suddenly the long arm ot coincidence stretched out and tied the Cases of the Nervous Psychiatrist and the Burnt Bohemian into one knot of Gordian complexity. Now it may be a cliché to add that Travers and Wharton soon got their teeth into the mystery, but in this particular case the phrase is not inappropriate. Christopher Bush is a proven master of the true detective story, and in this one he is at his urbanely intriguing and ingenious best.