The Peacock Feather Murders
By Carter Dickson

There will be ten teacups at Number 4, Berwick Terrace, w. 8., on Wednesday, July 31, at 5 p.m. precisely. The presence of the metropolitan police is respectfully requested. So goes the note received by Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters from the murderer. It's the exact same situation that Scotland Yard faced two years earlier when William Morris Dartley was murdered. The killer escaped justice then. Now the police are out in force, eyes on every door, and yet once again the killer strikes and succeeds. Unfortunately for the killer, when he's faced with an impossible crime, Inspector Masters turns to old friend Sir Henry Merrivale, the man who can always find the key to any locked room. If H.M. can't figure out how it was done, the who in this classic Golden Age whodunit from 1937 will go free.

Read more, and order this book!

Hag's Nook
By John Dickson Carr

Martin Starberth stands to inherit his family's estate provided he can fulfill a certain condition. Part of the estate is an old prison where the Starbeths had been wardens for generations. From a balcony off the Governor's Room, Starberth wardens watched countless men be hanged from the Hag's Nook gallows, their lifeless bodies dropping to a deep well below. A cholera epidemic wiped out the prison population decades earlier but a curse seems to have settled upon the Starberth family with several heirs meeting their death via a broken neck. To inherit the estate, each prospective heir must spend the night of his 25th birthday locked in that warden's room, hopefully escaping the curse. But when Martin's body is found battered, his neck broken, beneath the balcony, it seems that the curse has once again claimed a victim. First published in 1933, this is the first of 23 novels that would feature Dr. Gideon Fell, perhaps the most accomplished solver of locked room and impossible crime mysteries in the history of the genre.

Read more, and order this book!

Dead Men Don't Ski
By Patricia Moyes

"I can't remember a case with so many motives," Emmy remarks to her husband, Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. "Hauser must have been just about the most hated man in Europe." The Tibbetts are at a small resort in the Italian Tirol for a spot of skiing and to look into a little matter of interest to Interpol. The "most hated man in Europe" is Fritiz Hauser, a fat, odious little man who is a frequent visitor to the lodge, although he does not ski. The lodge itself is located high above a small village and is reachable only via the longest chair-lift in Europe. It is on that chair-lift that Hauser's body is discovered with a bullet through his heart. Just about all the guests at the resort had reason to want Hauser dead. An Italian policeman is in charge and he does a marvelous job of compiling timetables but it's up to Henry's intuitive police work, what he calls his "nose," that finally reveals whodunit. Published in 1959, this would be the first of nineteen books in which the Tibbetts solve crimes in various locales around the globe. As Katherine Hall Page says in her introduction, Moyes worked in the grand tradition of the Golden Age detective novel.

Read more, and order this book!

The Purple Parrot
By Clyde B. Clason

The only door open to Hezekiah Morse's study was under observation when someone slipped in and stabbed the bibliophile to death. To the police, it looked like only his granddaughter could have done the deed, especially since she was to be disinherited—except for a terra-cotta statuette of a purple parrot—if she defied Morse in her choice of a marriage partner. Her real love, lawyer Barry Foster, didn't believe she was capable of murder. Fortunately, for both of them, neither did Theocritus Lucius Westborough, professor of Roman history and sometime amateur sleuth. But the aged, tiny professor must first determine what is so significant about the seemingly worthless piece of statuary from New Zealand or how bottles of rare wine and expensive first editions fit into the case. First published in 1937.

Read more, and order this book!

8 Faces at 3
By Craig Rice

Chicago lawyer John J. Malone's mission in life is to keep every blonde—or brunette—or redhead—from going to the chair. Luckily for Holly Inglehart she's a redhead because that's just about the only thing she's got going for her when she's discovered unconscious on the floor next to dead body of the aunt who was about to disinherit her for marrying band leader Dick Drayton. She's also got Drayton's press agent, Jake Justus, and her best friend, neighboring deb Helene Brand, on her side. Helene's no ordinary deb. She can drink Malone and Justus under the table and if the rye holds out this trio of wisecracking sleuths just might get her off. It isn't going to be easy because just about everyone else in the case has an airtight alibi for the time of the murder—3 a.m.—which is when every clock in the Northshore mansion stopped. Originally published in 1939, this screwball gem was the first of a dozen books to feature these hard-drinking sleuths and helped make Rice not only the highest paid mystery writer in the country but also the first to appear on the cover of Time.

Read more, and order this book!

Murder on Wheels
By Stuart Palmer

Thick flakes of snow are falling on Fifth Avenue at twilight—and then the body of a young man suddenly falls among them, mysteriously out of the sky. Momentarily the wheels of traffic are halted, but other wheels spin relentlessly on—the wheels of death, the wheels on which blood murder moves silently through Manhattan's streets. Once again Miss Hildegarde Withers, the schoolteacher-detective, matches her wits against an unknown X, armed only with the prescious gift of common sense and a cotton umbrella. One youth is dead, and his twin brother moves under a cloud. Then death rolls past again, like a swifter Juggernaut, while Miss Withers faces the problem of the Driverless Roadster, the Man Who Wore Two Neckties, and the Symptoms of Bathtub Hands. This is Hildy's second case, first published in 1932.

Read more, and order this book!

Among Those Absent
By Manning Coles

With the Nazis beaten and the Russians not yet acting up too much, British Agent Tommy Elphinstone Hambledon is at loose ends so he agrees to do a bit of undercover work for the police by posing as an inmate at one His Majesty’s prisons. It seems that lately an alarming number of prisoners have escaped, fueling suspicions that it’s an organized effort. Tommy and a fellow prisoner named Cobden substitute themselves for the next escapees and find themselves sailing across the nighttime skies of Britain in a hydrogen balloon. But when the gang behind the escapes tumbles to the substitution, thinking Tommy is a real crook with a hidden stash, they ask him to share his ill-gotten gains. Tommy, of course, declines, and before long bodies begin to pile up. First published in 1948.

Read more, and order this book!