Читать книгу Bodies from the Library 3 - Группа авторов - Страница 5

‘You and I, serene in our armchairs as we read a new detective story, can continue blissfully in the old game, the great game, the grandest game in the world.’

John Dickson Carr

One of the many joys of visiting the British Library and other repositories is coming across forgotten or unknown works by some of the most highly regarded writers of the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction, a period that can be considered to have begun in 1913 with Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley, and to have ended in 1937, the year in which Dorothy L. Sayers sent Lord Peter Wimsey on a Busman’s Honeymoon.

This, the third collection of Bodies from the Library, continues our mission to bring into the light some of these little-known short stories and scripts, as well as works that have only appeared in rare volumes and never previously been reprinted. For this edition, there is a previously unpublished mystery featuring Ngaio Marsh’s famous detective, Inspector Roderick Alleyn, as well as a long lost novella in which John Dickson Carr’s satanic sleuth Henri Bencolin goes head to head with a brutal murderer. Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers confronts ‘The Riddle of the Black Spade’, and six authors go in search of a character as they rise to the challenge of building a short story around the same two-line plot. Among the more famous detectives featured are Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham, who does his bit to help defeat Hitler, and Senator Brooks U. Banner investigates a murderous scarecrow in a case from the pen of Joseph Commings.

And, in the year that marks 100 years of Agatha Christie stories, the inimitable Hercule Poirot investigates a murder foretold …

Tony Medawar

March 2020