Secondhand Crime Fiction & Thriller Bargain Book Box SP4191

Secondhand Crime Fiction & Thriller Crime Bargain Book Box SP4191

Twenty-one titles from the golden age and beyond — Agatha Christie in abundance, alongside Josephine Tey, Patricia Wentworth, Arthur Conan Doyle, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Kingsley Amis, Helen MacInnes, and John Dickson Carr. Please note these are secondhand copies and may show light signs of wear.

1. Towards Zero — Agatha Christie — A Superintendent Battle novel in which a murder is meticulously planned to frame someone else; Christie’s plotting here is as intricate as anything she wrote. The reversed structure — beginning with motive, ending with crime — is one of her formal experiments.
2. The Agatha Christie Mystery — Kathleen Tynan — A novel imagining the events of Christie’s famously unexplained eleven-day disappearance in 1926. Tynan’s fictional account is compulsively readable and treats the mystery with genuine respect.
3. The Catherine Wheel — Patricia Wentworth — A Miss Silver mystery set at an old inn where family secrets and murder converge; Wentworth’s genteel detective is at her most methodically brilliant.
4. Guilt Edged — W.J. Burley — A Wycliffe novel in which the detective investigates a death that looks like accident but feels like murder. Burley writes the regional detective novel with real atmospheric skill.
5. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle — The final collection of Holmes stories, gathering twelve cases including “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” and “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman.” Essential for any Holmes reader.
6. Brat Farrar — Josephine Tey — A young man is persuaded to impersonate a long-dead heir and claim a fortune, only to begin suspecting that the heir may not be dead. One of Tey’s finest novels and a masterpiece of sustained suspense.
7. Alpha Omega — Wilfred Glassford — A thriller from this Scottish crime writer, in which the pursuit of a dangerous secret organisation takes an agent across Cold War Europe.
8. By the Pricking of My Thumbs — Agatha Christie — A Tommy and Tuppence mystery in which a sinister painting seen in an old people’s home draws Tuppence into a decades-old murder. One of Christie’s late novels and one of her most atmospherically unsettling.
9. The Judge and His Hangman — Friedrich Dürrenmatt — The Swiss playwright’s first detective novel, in which a dying detective uses a murderer to catch an older criminal in a moral labyrinth that has never been untangled. A European masterpiece of the genre.
10. The A B C Murders — Agatha Christie — Poirot receives letters predicting murders at alphabetically sequential locations; the killer seems to be hiding a specific crime behind a pattern of apparently random ones. Widely considered one of Christie’s best.
11. Mrs. McGinty’s Dead — Agatha Christie — Poirot investigates the murder of a charwoman on behalf of a man condemned for the crime; the solution hinges on a photograph in a newspaper. A typically elegant Christie construction.
12. The Twentieth Day of January — Allbeury — A thriller in which a newly elected US President may have been compromised by the KGB; Allbeury (Ted Allbeury) was one of the most respected spy novelists of his generation.
13. The Riverside Villas Murder — Kingsley Amis — Amis’s homage to the golden age detective novel, set in the 1930s and following a teenage boy who solves a murder in his suburban street. Elegant, funny, and more serious than it first appears.
14. The Eye of the Needle — Thomas Walsh — A classic detective novel from the prolific Walsh, whose crime fiction spanned four decades and earned him the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
15. Cat Among the Pigeons — Agatha Christie — Murder at an exclusive girls’ school; Christie uses the setting brilliantly to create a world of hidden pasts and unexpected motives. Poirot appears relatively late and decisively.
16. Appointment with Death — Agatha Christie — Poirot encounters a monstrous matriarch and her oppressed family on a trip to Petra; her death, when it comes, seems to most of the family like a blessing. Christie’s study of psychological tyranny is more disturbing than most of her work.
17. At Bertram’s Hotel — Agatha Christie — Miss Marple stays at a London hotel that seems too perfectly like the England of her youth, and discovers something deeply wrong beneath the surface. One of Christie’s most elegant late novels.
18. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories — Agatha Christie — The collection containing Christie’s most celebrated short story and the basis for one of the greatest courtroom dramas ever filmed.
19. The Moon Is Down — John Steinbeck — Steinbeck’s 1942 novella about the occupation of a small northern European town; originally published clandestinely in occupied Europe. A work of quiet moral force that Nobel Prize judges later cited.
20. Poison in Jest — John Dickson Carr — An early Carr novel in which a family is being poisoned at intervals and the detective must find the killer before the murderer completes the set. Carr’s command of atmosphere is already fully developed.
21. North from Rome — Helen MacInnes — A thriller set in Rome in which an American writer becomes entangled in a conspiracy that threatens far more than his own life; MacInnes at her atmospheric best.