Detective Anthology

La collection «Asphalte Noir» revient en France et, après Paris, explore Marseille, de l'Estaque au Vieux-Port, de la Joliette à la Plaine, de la Belle de Mai au stade Vélodrome, en passant par le Panier ou les îles du Frioul... Marseille dans toute sa diversité, toutes ses communautés, toutes ses contradictions. Des nouvelles noires inédites, écrites spécialement pour ce recueil, par des auteurs marseillais de naissance ou d'adoption, œuvrant aussi bien dans le polar que la littérature générale.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” ( Booklist).

Jon Talbot is a history professor who makes sense of the past by examining facts. He also knows how to speculate about the what-ifs. Jon’s doing both following the death of his wife, Pax. Driving home late from a volunteer assignment, she plunged off a mountain highway and died. The police find nothing suspicious about the facts: a deer in the road, a blown tire, a broken neck. But the what-ifs are leading Jon down a twisting trail of secrets. After five years of marriage, he is finally getting to know his wife.

Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch accompanies his old friend and mentor, retired bush pilot Charley Stevens, as he pays a visit to a mysterious woman, the widow of a Vietnam vet, living in isolation in the Maine wilderness. Many years earlier, she had called Charley, then a young game warden himself, for help. She claimed that her badly bleeding husband had been attacked by a rabid bat. But in the succeeding days, despite her husband's increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior, his wife resisted Charley's attempts to help, arousing his suspicions that more was going on than met the eye.

Mr. Satterthwaite and Colonel Melrose are comfortably ensconced in the Colonel's study when the phone suddenly rings. Someone has been murdered, and, as the county chief constable, the Colonel lets Satterthwaite accompany him to the scene of the crime. The two of them have opposing opinions on why Sir James Dwighton has been bashed over the head with a blunt instrument. Rumor had it that red-haired beauty Laura Dwighton and her guest, the very attractive Mr. Paul Delangua, were engaged in an illicit affair, and Paul was thrown out by the disgruntled Sir James. But the facts of the murder all seem to add up too nicely....

A fictional priest and amateur detective named Father Brown had a face once described “as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling”. This made him appear somewhat clumsy and naïve, but that didn’t take into account his keen understanding of human nature and exceptional intuition. Stories include: “The Blue Cross”, “The Secret Garden”, “The Queer Feet”, “The Flying Stars”, “The Invisible Man”, and more.

Let Ellery Queen clue you in on his special brand of high tension, brain-teasing mystery! This collection consists of novelettes and short stories from Queen's many escapades.

Complete with fascinating biographies by Tony Medawar of all the featured authors, this latest volume in the annual Bodies from the Library series once again brings into the daylight the forgotten, the lost and the unknown, and is an indispensable collection for any bookshelf.

Queen's Bureau of Investigation is now open for business - and in each department of this new enterprise Ellery finds ample opportunity to exercise the brilliant, ingenious, and at times startling talents of his crime-lab mind. For to the bureau come some of the most plaguey cases in Queen's career.

With the possible exception of the expatriate writers living in Paris in the 1920s, no single group of American literary figures has achieved as much fame or notoriety as the New York sophisticates who met to match wits and attempt to outshine each other as members of what came to be called the Algonquin Round Table. The humorists Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman, playwrights Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, novelists Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott, and most famously, Dorothy Parker, were the literary luminaries who made up this group....

Previously part of a collection, this rare Ellery Queen mystery is available as a standalone audiobook for the first time. In "The Odd Man", Ellery is challenged to solve an imaginary riddle devised by three members of the Puzzle Club. With very little information to go on, he must correctly answer to his confreres which of their three imagined suspects is a secret criminal.

Previously part of a collection, this rare Ellery Queen mystery is available as a standalone audiobook for the first time. In "The Three Students", Ellery is challenged to solve an imaginary riddle devised by three members of the Puzzle Club. He must decide which of the titular trio (handily named Adams, Barnes, and Carver) stole a valuable ring from a university president's desk.

Comprising 10 short stories, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin first appeared in 1913. Each story features the eponymous gentleman-burglar, who deploys his remarkable wit and skill to plot a path through aristocratic society, outwitting both police and criminals along the way. This collection contains tales of romance and mystery, with Lupin himself never above performing the occasional good deed, while pocketing his own rewards, in the course of his adventures.

An aging, heavily-insured country squire whose estate is in financial ruin is thought to have committed suicide. Hercule Poirot investigates, in the guise of a representative of the victim's insurance company, to uncover the identity of the real murderer.

When Ebenezer Halliday's daughter's body is found stuffed underneath a train seat, the wealthy American industrialist hires Hercule Poirot to locate the murderer and over $100,000 worth of stolen jewels.

Movie star Mary Marvell consults with Hercule Poirot after receiving threatening letters that warn her to return her diamond, the famous "Western Star", to its rightful owner. But who does own the diamond, and is it even the genuine article?

A young banker is suspected of stealing one million dollars in Liberty Bonds on a transatlantic journey to New York, and appeals to Hercule Poirot to clear his name. Poirot learns the identities of the three people who hold keys to the locked trunk, but it won't be as easy to identify the true thief.

When wealthy spinster Emily French is found murdered, suspicion falls on Leonard Vole, the man to whom she hastily bequeathed her riches before she died. Leonard assures the investigators that his wife, Romaine Heilger, can provide them with an alibi. However, when questioned, Romaine informs the police that Vole returned home late that night covered in blood. During the trial, Ms. French's housekeeper, Janet, gives damning evidence against Vole.

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

Motivated by greed and jealousy, the criminal in this classic Sherlock Holmes mystery "The Adventure of the Priory School" aims to kidnap a young lord—but causes a far greater tragedy. This story is read by a true master, Edward Hardwicke, a talented actor who plays Sherlock Holmes's associate, Dr. Watson, in the popular PBS series Mystery!