A BIG Sunbeam touring car was crawling along the concrete road of one of the new building estates bordering on Ealing. Its occupants were gazing at the fronts of the houses on either side of the road.“I must explain that Christine is still under the spell of this new craze for modern houses, replete with all the gadgets which become your own property as soon as you have paid the first instalment to the building society,” said Herbert Mitchell to his friend Jim Milsom, who had undert...

A rich but curmudgeonly old man dies suddenly, and there is evidence of murder. But what was he doing in the night, in a seldom visited part-ruined chapel in his country estate of Carfax Abbey? Who was the man seen racing from the scene in an Essex motor car?

"What are you looking for, sir?" he said."Bloodstains."Scotland Yard is concerned with the murderer, or murderers, of the mysterious Bernard Pitt. The dead man is discovered with a false identity, courtesy of the many forged papers and documents found with him.The trail leads to France, where we discover why a French milliner chose to ride in a laundry basket, why the two American men are so interested in their wives' hat trimmings, and why it is so difficult ...

The D.D.I. recognized him and smiled. "That was a great case you brought us. You'll be interested to hear that it is a case of mur-r-der!"For eight years Basil Thomson headed the famous C.I.D., New Scotland Yard. He knew the Yard inside out. Now in this tale of mystery and detection we are taken behind the scenes. We are shown the greatest detection machine in the world in motion, and see how the Yard tracked down its man.Stand, then, with young P.C. Richardson on th...

In the great bure of Raiyawa there was a story-telling. The lying-places filled three sides of the house—mats spread upon grass four feet wide,—and between each lying-place was a narrow strip of bare earth sprinkled with wood-ashes, on which three logs, nose to nose, were smouldering. A thin curl of blue smoke wreathed upwards from each to the conical roof, where they met and filtered through the blackened thatch; so that from outside the bure looked like a disembowelled haystack smoulderi...

MY READERS WILL be divided between those who think that I have not told enough, that I have told too much and that I had better have told nothing at all. I bow my head to them all.The list of those to whom my thanks are due is too long to set out in a preface. It would include the names of my admirable staff, of sailors, soldiers and civilians of many countries besides our own in almost every walk of life and even of a few of our late enemies. No drama, no film story yet written has...

Savage Island: An Account of a Sojourn in Niué and Tonga is a vivid early twentieth-century travel narrative that combines ethnographic description, colonial memoir, and anecdotal reportage. Thomson records landscapes, customs, political structures, missionary influence, and everyday encounters in Niue and Tonga with a prose style at once observant, ironic, and unmistakably imperial. Situated within the literature of Pacific exploration after Cook and before professional anthropology fully...

None of the other guests could explain what she was doing in Crooked Lane during the night…Beautiful Margaret Gask, guest at Scudamore Hall, was shot to death on the driveway of the estate. The mink coat that she should have been wearing turned out to be the first clue Scotland Yard had to work on. Then a man she knew, a receiver of stolen goods, turns up dead. Soon more shady characters are drawn into the story: receivers, jewel thieves, confidence men and convict...

"There's one thing which I daresay you noticed—that pair of slippers half kicked under the bath were of men's size.""Yes, I noticed that, too, and they were sprinkled with blood."A man went calmly about his work while his wife lay dead in the house. After he is arrested and accused of the murder, doubt is cast regarding his guilt. Richardson is assigned the case.Richardson delves into the murdered woman's strange background, and becomes convinced that the law ...

ON A DEPRESSING November afternoon, when the street lights scarce sufficed to pierce the wet mist, a young policeman stood at his post in Baker Street at the point where Crawford Street joins the main thoroughfare. Moisture dripped from his helmet and glistened on his waterproof cape; the stream of traffic had splashed him with mud to the knees. People have been heard to wonder what passes through the minds of policemen during their long hours of point duty when they gaze on the stream of ...

Dans cette affaire tardive, Richardson, maintenant haut responsable du Yard, prend un siège arrière alors qu'une petite équipe de détectives commence une enquête sur le cas d'un homme assassiné non identifié, bien habillé et retrouvé dans une grange rurale.Au début, cela semble simple; la victime, une fois identifiée, avait disparu après avoir été soupçonnée d'avoir détourné une fortune de la banque où il travaillait ; mais cela devient vite complexe, car il y avait bien plus dans ...

THE INGRAINED love of personal liberty inherent in the British people and their distrust in giving additional power to their governments made Great Britain one of the slowest countries in the world to institute police. Jurists were far in advance of public opinion. Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832) considered police necessary as a method of precaution to prevent crimes and calamities as well as to correct and cure them. Blackstone in his Commentaries (1765) wrote, "By public police and economy I ...