Bodies from the Library

This anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together 13 rare tales by masters of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in book form, including a newly discovered Agatha Christie crime story that has not been seen since 1922. These orphaned works come mainly from magazines and newspapers that are now almost impossible to find.

Mystery stories have been around for centuries-there are whodunits, whydunits and howdunits, including locked-room puzzles, detective stories without detectives, and crimes with a limited choice of suspects. Countless volumes of such stories have been published, but some are still impossible to find: stories that appeared in a newspaper, magazine or an anthology that has long been out of print and unpublished stories that were absorbed into an author's archive when they died . . . Here for the first time are three never-before-published mysteries by Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh and Leo Bruce. Together with a newly unearthed short story by Ethel Lina White that inspired Hitchcock's , and a complete short novel by Christianna Brand, this diverse mix of tales by some of the world's most popular classic crime writers contains something for everyone. Complete with indispensable biographies by Tony Medawar of all the featured authors, the fourth volume in the series once again brings into the daylight the forgotten, the lost and the unknown.