Books in Detective Story Club series

A special 100th anniversary edition of J.S. Fletcher’s best detective novel, recognised as one of the Golden Age’s earliest and most successful classic stories.An unidentified elderly gentleman is found bludgeoned to death in London’s Middle Temple, that enclave of justice between Fleet Street and the Thames. After due investigation the police conclude that it was merely a case of robbery. But Frank Spargo, a young journalist who senses a scoop, and Inspector Rathbury of New Scotland Yard, who doesn’t, soon unearth fresh clues and join forces to solve an intricate and intriguing mystery.Joseph Smith Fletcher was a British writer and fellow of the Royal Historical Society who had studied law before turning to journalism. Dubbed ‘the Dean of Mystery Writers’, his literary career spanned some 200 books, with the seminal The Middle Temple Murder acclaimed as one of the genre’s defining novels, popular on both sides of the Atlantic with readers, critics and US Presidents alike.This Detective Club classic is introduced by the detective fiction historian Nigel Moss, celebrating 100 years since the book’s first publication. It includes the bonus of Fletcher’s earlier short story ‘The Contents of the Coffin’, his precursor to the full-length The Middle Temple Murder.

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.

One of the defining novels of the entire crime genre, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room has inspired readers and writers including Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and is now republished in hardback in the Detective Club series with a brand new introduction.Breaking down her door in response to the sounds of a violent attack and a gunshot, Mademoiselle Stangerson’s rescuers are appalled to find her dying on the floor, clubbed down by a large mutton bone. But in a room with a barred window and locked door, how could her assailant have entered and escaped undetected? While bewildered police officials from the Sûreté begin an exhaustive investigation, so too does a young newspaperman, Joseph Rouletabille, who will encounter more impossibilities before this case can be closed.The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, best remembered today as the author of The Phantom of the Opera, has been deservedly praised for more than a century as a defining book in the ‘impossible crime’ genre, as readable now as when it first appeared in French in 1907.This Detective Club classic includes an introduction by John Curran, who discusses how the book impressed and influenced a young Agatha Christie, was lauded by genre giants including John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Julian Symons, and remains to this day one of the most effective and enjoyable locked room mysteries ever written.