“Jiminy! He’s going to fish for him.” A small Cornish fishing hotel, The Tremarden Arms, is renowned for its adjacent waters where guests fish for salmon and trout. The unpleasant Colonel Donoughmore is found drowned in a salmon pool in the hotel grounds. He was dressed for fishing and his rod was on the bank nearby. The local Police concluded it was an unfortunate accident but Doctor Manson finds two peculiar circumstances which convinced him that this was a skilfully contrived murder. There were fellow fishermen out on the river banks near to where the Colonel was found dead, two of whom had publicly uttered threats against him. Furthermore, several other hotel guests had strong financial motives for removing him.

Why should a holidaymaker, sitting to enjoy a game of village cricket, suddenly meet with death in the shape of a flying bullet? That most English of sporting pastimes: a cricket match between two rivalrous village teams. The game has just ended in a closely fought draw, and the village green is emptied of all spectators, bar one. A dead man is found sitting in a deck chair on the boundary line, clearly shot during the match. The man is a stranger, with no obvious clue to his identity or that of his killer. Nobody has seen or heard the shot fired. The local police are baffled, and call in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Manson, investigative detective par excellence, to solve a seemingly impossible crime.

“I think you had better telephone for the police,” he said. “This woman has been poisoned.” Norma de Grey, the Principal in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington, was not popular with the rest of the Pavilion Theatre company. But was she hated enough to be killed by prussic acid, during the performance itself? Suspicion immediately falls on the Cat, her fellow actor in the fatal scene. Until it transpires that the Cat too has been poisoned – and his understudy has a solid alibi. But someone must have donned the disguise and appeared on stage incognito. Detective-Inspector Harry Manson, analytical detective par excellence, is on the case.

It was at that moment that Jack knew he had to kill. The trouble began during a holiday in Paignton. When Jack met Mary, his future wife, he also met James Sprogson, a charming villain bent on destroying the couple’s happiness. Mary distrusted Sprogson but Jack regarded him as a good fellow who drank and gambled a little too much, perhaps, but was harmless and likeable. However, Jack’s association with Sprogson was to lead to robbery, blackmail and, at last, murder. This is the eighth of the Doctor Manson mysteries, first published in 1950. A classic example of the inverted murder story, it is in the best tradition of the golden age detective novel. It further enhanced the reputation which E. and M.A. Radford established for themselves as writers of ingenious ‘whodunits’.

Seven men and a woman were in the first-class coach of a train from London to Brighton. They had travelled together each evening for months. That night one of them, Alexis Mortensen, editor of a scurrilous newspaper, died from strychnine poisoning. Strychnine acts inside fifteen minutes, but Mortensen had had nothing which could have contained the poison for an hour before his death. An unbelievably grotesque story from the past was to be uncovered before the case was solved.

When thriller writer Morley Stewart was found shot dead in his country house, with a revolver by his side, it seemed, and was accepted as, suicide. But Doctor Manson, who was spending a fishing holiday nearby, saw the body and the room and noticed two odd circumstances. Searching diligently, it was not long before he was able to reveal that it was murder not suicide.