The debut of celebrated detective Colonel Anthony Gethryn. Brutal murder enmeshes sleuth in dark tale of revenge. Superb suspense, shocking denouement.

How was Sir Albert Lines-Bower murdered? But was he murdered? Scotland Yard is puzzled, and so is Colonel Anthony Gethryn, the hero of that clever yarn, “The Rasp.” But together they solve the mystery.

Gentleman detective Anthony Gethryn is in a race against time to save an innocent man from the hangman’s noose. Colonel Anthony Gethryn is recalled from a holiday in Spain to solve a murder in the November fogs of London. He finds that his wife is sheltering Mrs Bronson, whose husband is in prison awaiting execution for the murder of a gamekeeper six months before. A petition for reprieve has been rejected and Bronson will shortly hang for someone else’s crime. Convinced by Mrs Bronson of her husband’s innocence, Gethryn embarks on a seemingly hopeless race against time to overthrow the guilty verdict and find the real murderer – and he has only five days before Bronson’s date with the hangman’s noose. The Noose saw the return of Philip MacDonald’s gentleman detective Anthony Ruthven Gethryn, whose debut in The Rasp six years earlier had been a big success. Judged to be his best book yet, The Noose had the distinction of being chosen as the first book to be published in Collins’ Crime Club in May 1930, helping to immortalise it as one of the seminal books of the crime genre. This Detective Story Club classic includes an introduction by H. R. F. Keating, which first appeared in the Crime Club’s 1985 ‘Disappearing Detectives’ series.

What at first seems like a quiet isolated country house on the British coast becomes the sinister setting for murder. Upstairs beneath a bolted door is a stream of blood. A classic locked-room mystery starring the incomparable sleuth Anthony Gethryn.

1938, hardcover bookclub edition, Doubleday, NY. 318 pages. Crime novel, featuring Colonel Anthony Gethryn.

Brigadier-General George Firth of Scotland Yard was surprised and delighted when Adrian Messenger contacted him - he hadn't seen his old friend for at lest six months. However, when they met, Firth sensed that all was not well. Messenger handed him a list of ten men's names and asked Firth to use his influence to investigate them. The following day Messenger was due to fly to America, but he never reached his destination for the aeroplane on which he was travelling crashed. And when First started to investigate the men on Messenger's list he discovered that each of them had met an accidental death in the last five years ...