In 1879, race walking competitions, known as “wobbles,” were all the rage. The death of a contender, followed by a second murder, introduces Sergeant Cribb, who goes on to investigate sports-related deaths in a series of eight books.

“This entertaining period mystery, set in Victorian England, is lively, lurid, amusing.”—Publishers Weekly “These are humorous novels and the humour is character-based . . . mixed with the absurdities of the English class-system... Cribb was the first of the new-wave Victorian crime-fighters and is arguably still the best.”—Sherlock Holmes Magazine The second Sergeant Cribb mystery is set in the world of Victorian bare-fisted pugilism—an illegal sport. Constable Jago is sent, undercover, to Radstock Hall by Sergeant Cribb, who suspects that when fighters who train there lose, they are murdered.

A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of the audience. A trapeze artist misses her timing when the trapeze ropes are shortened. A comedian who invites the audience to sing along with him finds the words of his song “shamefully” altered. Mustard has been applied to a sword swallower’s blade. A singer’s costume has been rigged. The girl in a magician’s box is trapped. Then the mischief escalates to murder. Or was murder intended all along? That indomitable detective team, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray of Scotland Yard, must track down the elusive criminal.

Brighton in 1882 is the setting of this novel of crime and tangled emotions. Albert Moscrop, a visitor whose holiday is dedicated to peering through a telescope at the seaside scene, marches down Queen’s Road to the beach and draws us through a sequence of disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama, played in the fashionable haunts of the nineteenth-century resort: beach, piers, promenade, swimming bath, aquarium, and Devil’s Dyke. A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family of holidaymakers—the Protheros, and especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her excessively for granted. Gradually Moscrop moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder. All Brighton is horrified by the gruesome crime. The local police seek the help of Scotland Yard, which is provided in the persons of Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. These indomitable detectives soon find themselves challenged by the strangest case of their careers, one that is as mystifying as it is macabre.

The year is 1884 and a series of bomb blasts has caused mayhem in London. The perpetrators are Irishmen seeking independence. One of the "infernal machines" has even bombed the CID office at Scotland Yard. Worse, Constable Thackeray is suspected of conspiring with the terrorists. Reluctantly Sergeant Cribb attends a course in the science of bomb-making and infiltrates the Dynamite Party. Based on the real events in London in 1884-5, the story had its own resonance ninety years on

Scotland Yard's Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray investigate a case involving a burgled risque painting, the occult, and a violent death that interrupts a seance in the home of a Royal Academy member

Scotland Yard's Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray take a spirited young witness on a boating trip to find three men suspected of having murdered a tramp

By her own confession, Miriam Cromer is a murderess. She is sentenced to death and the hangman travels to London to earn his fee. Then the Home Office is sent a photograph that casts doubt on the confession. The matter must be investigated, and fast. Sergeant Cribb is called in and his investigations produce nothing to ease the minds of the authorities. As he plunges deeper into the relationships and history of the small group connected with the murder, he becomes increasingly suspicious that something very different happened at Park Lodge, Kew Green, on 12th March, 1888.