“It’s terrible. It’s a body . . . the head cut off . . . and the hands.”Who is—or was—the headless, handless corpse, found discarded on a bonfire? This baffling case of identity leads to a dead doctor who, according to information received, committed murder himself and was in turn murdered by his victim. A contradiction in terms—or is it? The solution to this mystery involves a taciturn match-seller, unbreakable alibis and several double identities on the part of both the ...

“At first it may seem an astounding coincidence that two members of a family should have considered it necessary to ask for the services of the same detective agency. I think I can prove otherwise, and even if I can’t, the facts remain. Alice Stonhill and Peter Wesslake did precisely what I have said, and what’s more . . .”So Ludovic Travers says at the opening of a case in which he joins with Bill Ellice and Superintendent George Wharton to solve the mystery of a novelist...

Providence, they say, is good to drunkards and children. Maybe there’s a third category—the unorthodox detective.A new case finds Ludovic Travers travelling to the respectable English Midlands town of Mainford. He is commissioned to investigate the death, under compromising circumstances, of Harry Landlace—a man of civic virtue. There is the suggestion of a smear and as Travers attempts to clear Landlace’s name, he uncovers something the dead man was on the verge of reveal...

‘I judge him to have been dead just about twenty-four hours. Suicide, almost certainly.’Ludovic Travers polished his eyeglasses. Inspector Wharton grunted—sure signs of impending mystery. And they were right.The car took the wrong turning and landed them in double murder dressed as suicide. In one room, made up for her principal success, Mary Tudor, was Mary Legreye—poisoned on her throne. In the next, the handyman—dead on the floor. Nothing initially just...

“Good God!” I was staring like a lunatic. “Murdered, you say? When?”“Less than half an hour ago, sir.”TRAVERS: “I don’t know why I should call this case that of the Magic Mirror for there’s nothing in it reminiscent of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” even if the mirror did do a certain amount of magical revelation.“As a matter of fact the title is my obstinate own. In the first place, of the many murder cases with which I have been officially co...

Whoever was driving that car was either drunk or mad.The Case of the Flowery Corpse takes Ludovic Travers to the English rural idyll of Marstead in Suffolk, visiting his old friend Henry Morle. The quiet village seems hardly the place for mystery. Yet, following a car crash, a blackmail case emerges – and worse, not one, but two murders. There are multiple suspects, including a pair of twin doctors and a femme fatale, not to mention the looming presence of a US Ar...

His head went sideways, like a hopping sparrow’s on a lawn.The man who saves Henry Clandon’s life during the campaign in Sicily visits him once in hospital, gives his name as David Seeway, makes vague and apparently pointless reference to somebody else called Archie Dibben and a country town called Bassingford, and then virtually disappears. Eight years later, Henry Clandon, now a director of a London publishing firm, sets out to try and find his rescuer.This is ho...

Murder on Mondays! Greatest prophecy of the century! T.P. Luffham was murdered!Ferdinand Pole of the Murder League claims that, since 1918, thirteen murders have been committed on a Monday. A sleazy economist has now been slain, followed the next week by a blameless actress—both on Monday. While the press have a field day, it is up to Inspector Wharton of Scotland Yard, along with his inspired amateur co-investigator Ludovic Travers, to see if London has a new Jack the Rip...

Enough words and enough speed and you can get away with murder.There was something unique about the Case of the Treble Twist. It isn't often one gets a preview of a case or hovers round its fringes four years before it breaks, but that was just what happened here. The preview began the evening Ludovic Travers had a drink with Chief Inspector Jewle, and first heard the name of Harry Tibball, suspect involved in a series of big-scale robberies. Then a few months later Tibbal...

“Send someone here quick. There’s been a murder!”Mr Lewton is dead. Stabbed through the back, no possibility of suicide—and no sign of a knife either. The deceased made a phone call summoning a doctor immediately before his own death. And the servant who supposedly reported the murder wasn’t even at the scene of the crime, and denies all knowledge. These are among the bizarre opening features of a classic labyrinthine whodunit from a master of the genre—an adventure into w...

“Let us know when you’re dead!”Ludovic Travers had known it was a publicity stunt, all that business about the anonymous threatening letters. He expected a hoax but what he found was two men lying dead on the floor of Crewe’s bedroom. To be confronted with murder at eight in the morning was no joke. Norris, the quiet, steady Inspector of Scotland Yard, certainly didn’t think so, although during the weeks he and Travers sought to puzzle it all out, he many times remarked, “...

Just round the corner I'd be in sight of the main entrance to the flats. And that's all I remember. That, and a tremendous pain, and a kind of flash.An urgent plea from Lady Marport to find her missing seventeen-year-old daughter plunges Ludovic Travers into Soho's dark underworld of blackmail, drugs and murder-a subterranean search that leads to discotheques, a pep-pill ring and a pornographic film company.Who was the mysterious bearded man whom the missing girl, ...