Leo Bruce

Carolus Deene, the amateur detective with his own style of solving riddles of violent death, has to bide his time in the small Kentish village of Clibburn, where he is early given to understand he is a 'foreigner'. However, despite a trick to have him elsewhere, he is present when a popular local figure is shot dead on the stroke of midnight, and before his work is completed he has the answers to two other deaths, one of which was not even suspected. While he is not sure how seriously to take the local witchcraft stories, he perceives how a past event can have provided a blackmailer with a rare opportunity—and from that moment his own life is in danger.

Case for Three Detectives is possibly the most unusual mystery ever written. A murder is committed, behind closed doors, in bizarre circumstances. Three amateur detectives take the case: Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon, and Monsignor Smith (in whom discerning readers will note remarkable likenesses to some familiar literary figures). Each arrives at his own brilliant solution, startling in its originality, ironclad in its logic. Meanwhile, Sergeant Beef sits contemptuously in the background. "But," he says, know who done it."

"Five men occupied their usual places in a first-class carriage, but the sixth place was empty..." It is most unusual for the sixth man, Mr Parador, to be late. The five commuters are wondering what happened to him, when a strange-looking man enters the compartment, dressed all in black and wearing dark glasses. No one knows who he is, but when he is told that the sixth seat is taken, he replies, in a deep sepulchral voice, "He won't be coming." He is right. Parador does not come, and in fact his companions never see him alive again. And if Carolus Deene had not taken an interest in the case, the coroner's verdict of suicide would not have been questioned. This is the twelfth mystery in the delightful Carolus Deene series. It is set in the bedroom community of Brenstead, where Carolus meets the usual complement of English eccentrics, including Mr Hopelady, the vicar who loves practical jokes, and the sex-obsessed gardener, Boggett. The denouement is, as always, a clever solution to a macabre and dangerous puzzle.

The Coroner's Jury found that the boy hanged in the school gymnasium had killed himself, but Sgt. Beef disagrees. He takes a job as a temporary school caretaker, abetted by the reluctant Townsend—Beef's biographer—whose brother is a master at the school. Beef's methods are not to Townsend's liking, as they entail endless games of darts and beer all around in the local pub. Then there is another remarkably similar murder which ocurs elsewhere and Beef bestirs himself to uncover the guilty.

Within the space of an hour or two the dead bodies of two elderly ladies, Miss Sophia Carew and Mrs. Westmacott, were discovered in the vicinity of the town of Buddington-on-the-Hill; both women had been very recently murdered; death in each case had been caused by strangulation; each was found lying at full length clasping in her hands the stem of a Madonna lily. As far as anyone knew there was no connection between the two women; they had never met each other; although both were well-to-do there was no evidence that a beneficiary from the will of one could expect any benefit from the will of the other. The work of a maniac? Could there be two murderers planning together their foul deeds? It falls to Carolus Deene, the inimitable schoolmaster—who was supposed to be taking it easy, recuperating from a severe attack of jaundice—to unravel the knot of mystery and prove himself once again a master detective.

At the end of the Summer term, Carolus Deene, amateur detective cum history master of Queen's School, Newminster, is summoned to Suffolk to investigate the circumstances attending the discovery of the body of Mrs Lillianne Bomberget, a writer of detective fiction. The body had been buried in the sand in an upright position with only the head protruding; at least one tide had been over it. Before Carolus Deene's investigations are complete his interest begins to flag, but two further bodies appear on the scene, stimulating the schoolmaster detective to pursue this "beastly case" with renewed acumen to its ultimate and bitter conclusion.

In the firm of Clunk & Clunk, Solicitors, it is the careful routine that any unknown client should be unobtrusively inspected by specialists in every department of its varied practice. The publican, Bryony, was a new client, but he adamantly refused to speak to anyone except Joshua Clunk in person. He was quite right, of course. There is only one Clunk, a plump little creature, with a shining yellow complexion, his own highly original code of morals and a disconcerting propensity for hymn singing. None of which mattered to Bryony. He had come for help, because he was suspected of murder. Help in such circumstances is Mr. Clunk's speciality. What Bryony didn't know, though Mr. Clunk soon suspected, was that the little seaside town of Calbay, where he lived, contained more mysteries than one. The town council was oddly secretive. The local and County police were at daggers drawn with each other. And the death of the unfortunate Gussage was only the first in a whole succession of fatal — and dubious — accidents. And, of course, there was the question of the dead man's shoes. Or, rather, their absence. At first Mr. Clunk seemed to be baffled. But he waited, like a cat, ready to pounce...

There are strange goings-on at St. Asprey's, an expensive boys preparatory school: footsteps in passages at night ... strange lights . rabbits with battered skulls .. a face in the window ...a puppy found in a pool of blood . .. and even worse to come. Who is the most logical choice to investigate these strange phenomena but Carolus Deene, the Senior History Master at Queen's School? In a tense, chilling atmosphere of blackmail among the blackboards when the ghostly charades prove to be only a prelude to murder Carolus has some spine-tingling experiences before he solves the mystery of the curious and sinister happenings at St. Asprey's School.

Carolous Deene, Schoolmaster and sometime detective is called to the village of Gladhurst, some 40 miles from the school, by Mrs Bobbin, who asks him to unmask the murderer of her sister. — Here he meets a succession of colourful characters, including a paranoid ex-naval officer, a vicar who is permanently on the horns of a dilemma, his curate, who is more of a scoutmaster, a policeman who insists on being called a 'Police Officer', and an extraordinary number of furious old women.

Mr. Wellington Chickle, a retired watchmaker, plans the perfect murder, but he chooses the wrong victim. The dead man's sister refuses to accept the idea that it is suicide and calls in the unprepossessing Sergeant Beef who unravels the plot with the aid of the local police. Meanwhile, Townsend, Beef's indefatigable chronicler, comes to a completely different—and completely wrong—conclusion.

IT WAS NOT SO MUCH a question of "who-done-it" as of "who-done-what." Respectable solicitors do not disappear every day, but Duncan Humby had vanished into thin air while on his way to prepare a new will for James Grossiter—a will in which the crotchety millionaire intended to dispossess all his relations and his manservant in favor of numerous charities. The death from a heart attack of Old Grossiter himself was too much of a coincidence for Carolus Deene, who was called upon to find the missing solicitor, and as he made his way to the remote village of Hallows End, where Humby's car had been seen and where Grossiter was staying, he had a strong feeling of sinister evil and danger ... a feeling that was soon to be translated into horrible fact.

At first there seemed to be no doubt who had killed Cosmo Ducrow, the recluse millionaire, with a croquet mallet, but the police are reluctant to arrest the obvious suspect. The family calls in Sergeant Beef and his tireless chronicler Townsend to solve the crime. Then there is another murder faked to look like suicide before Beef's unorthodox methods finally bear fruit.

Once again Lionel Townsend, Beef's Dr. Watson, faithfully records the redoubtable Sergeant's escapades. Beef has left the Braham police and gone into business for himself. Lionel Townsend loyally comments: "He had already hinted to me that he was thinking of retiring from his post as a country police sergeant, but I had never dreamed that the luck he had had in stumbling on the solutions to a couple of murder mysteries would lead him into anything of this sort Poor old Beef!. That he should have kept his job at Braham had surprised me, for his fondness for the local pubs was a byword. That he should have been the means of tracing two murderers was a miracle. That he should be able to earn a living as a private investigator was beyond credulity." But Beef does get a client: Stewart Ferrars, who has been arrested for the Sydenham Murder. Beef is hired by Stewart's brother Peter to prove Stewart innocent of the murder of Dr. Benson, who has been found stabbed in the throat in the library of Peter's gloomy Victorian mansion, The Cypresses. An ornamental dagger with Peter's fingerprints on it has been left on a table near the dead man's armchair.

Gentleman Detective Carolus Deene is called to investigate the disappearance of Mrs. Rathbone, and perhaps the second Mrs. Rathbone, and the third. With little more than the title clues to aid him, Deene tracks a man who seems to have a habit of murdering his wives — a man on the order of John Reginald Christie or Wives-in-the-Bath Smith. Bizarre, richly comic and sometimes sinister characters lead him to a remote region of East Kent, to London and to an art colony in Cornwall on the way to a surprising conclusion.

Der Tod der jungen Frau ist nie offiziell bestätigt worden. Für die Dorfbewohner stehtes fest, daß sie ermordet wurde – nicht aber für Carolus Deene. Erst als ein Mann eines gewaltsamen Todes gestorben ist, glaubt auch er an die Wahrscheinlichkeit des Gerüchts und die Existenz einer Toten

It was an old family friend who got Carolus Deene embroiled in this latest case of his. Helena Gort, well on in her sixties, was staying at Cat's Cradle, a guesthouse by the sea; things had been going seriously wrong at Cat's Cradle . . . two deaths adjudged respectively as 'natural causes' and 'suicide' . . . resulting in " an atmosphere not disagreeable so much as disturbing. The story opens with Helena calling on Carolus and begging him to come with her to stay at Cat's Cradle, so that he can use his redoubtable gifts of detection and solve any crime or crimes there may have been and prevent any worse calamity. For there was no doubt in Helena's mind that something sinister had happened and something very unpleasant was brewing. She was right.

Richard Hoysden's body is discovered in his country flat, a revolver beside him and a bullet through the head, apparently a suicide. Missing from the room is a tape of Hoysden's last moments on which he confesses to the murder of a young woman. Lady Drombone, a member of Parliament and the dead man's aunt, hires Carolus to help suppress the evidence. He must reconstruct the confusing circumstances in order to solve this baffling crime.