Penguin classic crime

Sailor, a small-time crook, arrives in Sante Fe, New Mexico, determined to blackmail Senator McIntyre.

The mysterious recluse Eric Crowther was murdered, he lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage, much as the man himself overshadowed the lives of the occupants of the little white house. Indeed, as Detective Chief Inspector W.T. Challoner soon discovered, seven people had good cause to murder him. Everyone ought to have done it, but by the evidence nobody had. The seven suspects, all with excellent motives for killing the hateful Eric Crowther. So it was not lack of evidence but rather a surfeit of it which sent Challoner and his son Jerry half across Europe in pursuit of the trail. He collected their secrets. And he used them. But whick of these long-time sufferers had found the courage to pull the trigger? And should this benefactor really be prosecuted? The White Cottage Mystery was Margery Allingham's first detective story, published initially as a newspaper serial in 1927.

From Bloomsbury.com: "It is October 1940 and at Oxford the Full Term has just begun. Robert Warner, up and coming playwright known for his experimental approach, has chosen an Oxford repertory theater for the premiere of his latest play, Metromania. Together with his cast he comes to Oxford to rehearse a week before the opening, but Warner's troupe is a motley group of actors among whom is the beautiful but promiscuously dangerous Yseut Haskell . She causes quite a stir with her plots, intrigues and love triangles. When she is found shot dead in the college room of a young man who is infatuated with her, everyone is puzzled and worried –most of the actors have had a reason to get rid of the femme fatale and few have alibis. The police are at loss for answers and are ready to proclaim the incident as suicide, but Gervase Fen, an Oxford don and professor of literature, who thrives off solving mysteries, is ready to help. The Case of the Gilded Fly, first published in 1944, is Edmund Crispin's debut novel and also the first Gervase Fen Mystery."

"Doctor, I'm losing my mind." So begins John Franklin Bardin's unconventional crime thriller in which a psychiatrist attempts to help his patient lead to a dead-end world of amnesia and social outcasts. The Deadly Percheron is a murder mystery, poignant love story, and an unsettling and hallucinatory voyage into memory, madness, and despair.

Inglewood Turrets, an expensive anachronism in the leafy outskirts of North London is a cross between St Pancreas Station and Holloway Gaol, and the house where the formidable Miss Charlotte Cambric recreates Victorian elegance for foreign culture-vultures. Vassily Kopeck, the half-Russian, half-Polish physicist and an 'attache of sorts', disappears as effectively as a cat who turns a corner in a London fog after a visit to The Turrets - and thereby becomes a wanted man. Then Felix Perdreau, the flamboyant rare book dealer and friend of Kopek also goes missing. Making a case for Albert Campion, who cannot resist a mystery?

During a walk to Elvedon House, palatial home of the Tythertons, Sir John Appleby and Chief Constable Colonel Pride are stunned to find a police van and two cars parked outside. Wealthy Maurice Tytherton has been found shot dead, and Appleby is faced with a number of suspects - Alice Tytherton, flirtatious, younger wife of the deceased; Egon Raffaello, disreputable art dealer; and the prodigal son, Mark Tytherton, who has just returned from Argentina. Could the death be linked to the robbery of some paintings several years ago?

Father Brown, an unassuming and shabbily dressed priest, possesses an incredible ability to solve crimes and murders. Here he reveals the secret of his success. He discovers the culprit by imagining himself to be inside the mind of the criminal. This fourth collection of Father Brown stories contains the magnificent ‘The Chief Mourner of Marne’- a fascinating story with unexpected twists – about a duel and a case of mistaken identity.

Sir Eustace is a cad of the first water, with a specialty in other men's wives, and the list of people who might want to do him in could fill a London phone book. But which of them actually sent the chocolates with their nasty hidden payload? Scotland Yard is baffled. Enter the Crime Circle, a group of society intellectuals with a shared conviction in their ability to succeed where the police have failed. Eventually, each member will produce a tightly reasoned solution to the Case of the Poisoned Chocolates, but each of those solutions will identify a different murderer. First published in 1929, this is both a classic of the golden age of mystery fiction, and one of the great puzzle-mysteries of all time.