After a boozy Oxford reunion, Bognor is distressed to learn one of his classmates is a killer. Nothing depresses Simon Bognor like a university reunion. Every pimply-faced boy he knew two decades prior has made something of himself, while Bognor languishes at the Board of Trade, muddling along in an investigatory position for which he is hideously unqualified. Although more often than not his job requires catching murderers, he lacks even the observational powers to notice when the head of...

When Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, arrives for a semester as Visiting Fellow at his old friend's university down under, he is met with a nasty surprise. Indeed the surprises keep coming and they get nastier as the plot unravels. An exotic cast of suspicious academi includes an ecologically-correct axeman, a professor of wine and the world's leading authority on an esoteric form of Australian hedgehog. Then there is the student body to consid...

THE DUKE is the biography of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, a celebrity in his own right and yet an enigma still, even after 60 years in the public eye.What is he really like? Bombastic, autocratic, say his critics. Colourful, stimulating, say his admirers.Tim Heald was given a unique opportunity to find out for himself. Not for twenty years had a biographer been allowed such access to talk to Prince Philip and watch him at work - still ver...

As the friars of the abbey gather for group prayer, Brother Luke stays in the garden. His tardiness is not due to an overenthusiasm for his potatoes, but to the fact that he is lying facedown in the dirt, strangled to death by his own crucifix. For Simon Bognor, this will prove inconvenient. A special investigator attached to the British Board of Trade, Bognor knows that Brother Luke was an undercover agent, come to look into charges of national agriculture secrets being smuggled across th...

Staggering homeward from a banquet, St. John Derby decides it would be easier to stagger back to work instead. When he reaches his desk, the booze-addled gossip columnist treats himself to a massive tumbler of port and calls for a taxi. By the time the cab arrives, the port is spilled on the carpet, mingling with the blood leaking from Derby’s cut throat. No one will mourn his death. Special investigator Simon Bognor is dispatched to get the scoop on who finished off the sodden old scribe....

In his lavish private train car, Sir Roderick Farquhar draws a bath. When it has been filled to his satisfaction, the portly captain of industry tips in three drops of bath oil and lowers himself into the steam. Within seconds, the poison in the oil has stopped his heart and ruined Simon Bognor’s winter. A special investigator for Britain’s Board of Trade, Bognor makes the mistake of believing a Canadian friend’s assurances that Toronto is never cold in November. He is coatless and shiveri...

Bognor braves the frost to discover who has murdered Canada's richest man. In his lavish private train car, Sir Roderick Farquhar draws a bath. When it has been filled to his satisfaction, the portly captain of industry tips in three drops of bath oil and lowers himself into the steam. Within seconds, the poison in the oil has stopped his heart and ruined Simon Bognor's winter. A special investigator for Britain's Board of Trade, Bognor makes the mistake of believing a Canadian friend's as...

Flush with cash from the success of his latest insipid blockbuster, aspiring film mogul Irving Silverburger takes to Venice to soak himself in luxury. Instead, he is quickly soaked in blood. Cruising down the canal in a vaporetto, Silverburger is shot with a crossbow, killed by a Harlequin who disappears into the masquerade of Carnival. Unmasking the disguised assassin falls to Simon Bognor, a British Board of Trade detective whose natural sloth did not prevent him from stumbling backward ...

Bognor tries to understand how a publishing magnate could have been crushed by smut. Before retiring for the night, Vernon Hemlock pours a brandy, lights a cigar, and takes a look at his cache of pornography. Far more than a wad of dirty magazines stashed under a mattress, this is a collection of some of the world's finest erotica, dating back as far as a dirty doodle drawn by da Vinci. The millionaire publisher is perusing the Swedish section when the shelves begin to move. By the time he...

Dinner service is over, the staff has left, and Escoffier Savarin Smith is about to tuck into a couple of bottles of champagne. He seals the windows with electrical tape, fiddles with a canister of gas, and begins to drink. When his staff arrives the next morning to open the restaurant, the champagne is drunk, the air has been poisoned, and the greatest chef in England is dead – seemingly by his own hand. For Board of Trade investigator Simon Bognor, this is a crushing blow. Although he mo...

Nothing depresses Simon Bognor like a university reunion. Every pimply-faced boy he knew two decades prior has made something of himself, while Bognor languishes at the Board of Trade, muddling along in an investigatory position for which he is hideously unqualified. Although more often than not his job requires catching murderers, he lacks even the observational powers to notice when the head of his old college has been poisoned. Both quite drunk, they totter off to their respective beds....

As head of the Criminal Studies department at the University of Wessex, Doctor Tudor Cornwall has murder on his mind. One violent death that has always bothered him is the killing of Alec D'Urberville in the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of The D'Urbervilles. He therefore decides to rewrite Hardy's account in the style of his contemporary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This task is complicated by a real-life contemporary murder that bears some uncanny resemblances to the nineteenth century fiction. Wi...