Doctor Manson

Why should a holidaymaker, sitting to enjoy a game of village cricket, suddenly meet with death in the shape of a flying bullet? That most English of sporting pastimes: a cricket match between two rivalrous village teams. The game has just ended in a closely fought draw, and the village green is emptied of all spectators, bar one. A dead man is found sitting in a deck chair on the boundary line, clearly shot during the match. The man is a stranger, with no obvious clue to his identity or that of his killer. Nobody has seen or heard the shot fired. The local police are baffled, and call in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Manson, investigative detective par excellence, to solve a seemingly impossible crime. Murder Isn't Cricket was originally published in 1946. This new edition includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Nigel Moss.

It was at that moment that Jack knew he had to kill. The trouble began during a holiday in Paignton. When Jack met Mary, his future wife, he also met James Sprogson, a charming villain bent on destroying the couple's happiness. Mary distrusted Sprogson, but Jack regarded him as a good fellow, who drank and gambled a little too much, perhaps, but was harmless and likeable. However, Jack's association with Sprogson was to lead to robbery, blackmail and, at last, murder. This is the eighth of the Doctor Manson mysteries, first published in 1950. A classic example of the inverted murder story, it is in the best tradition of the golden age detective novel. It further enhanced the reputation, which E. and M.A. Radford established for themselves as writers of ingenious 'whodunits'.

Alexis Mortensen rose from his chair in the first-class Pullman and walked into the corridor. None of the remaining occupants noticed that he had left them until after Death, travelling at 60 miles an hour, had reached out for him... Seven men and a woman were in the first-class coach of a train from London to Brighton. They had traveled together each evening for months. That night one of them, Alexis Mortensen, editor of a scurrilous newspaper, died from strychnine poisoning. Strychnine acts inside fifteen minutes, but Mortensen had had nothing, which could have contained the poison for an hour before his death. An unbelievably grotesque story from the past was to be uncovered before the case was, solved.