The first Simon Bognor "mystery" set in an Anglican Friary where everybody is behaving badly and some criminally. Based on Heald's real-life research for a "Trevelyan Scholarship" while still at school.

At a for-profit ancestral pile, Bognor seeks an earl-killing sniper As real estate moguls slice and dice the great properties of the English countryside, the rambling grounds of Abney House are kept intact by being turned into a sort of theme park of the aristocracy for the public—complete with cafeteria, sailing museum, and safari-themed shooting gallery. But the theme isn't complete until a visiting earl is felled by a sniper's bullet, giving Abney House what every manor needs: a blue-blooded murder. Normally this killing would not fall under the jurisdiction of Board of Trade investigator Simon Bognor, but the downed earl was tied up in a top-secret international exchange, and the killing may have had a political motive. As Bognor settles into life at the old estate, he is forced to decide which will be more dangerous: the sharpshooting assassin, or the tedious aristocratic company.

Book by Heald, Tim

When the champion of Three Corners, the finest dog ever bred in Alisa Potts’ kennels, is found lying dead in the corner of his enclosure, it’s up to Simon Bognor, special investigator for the Board of Trade, to find out what happened. No dog lover, Bognor doesn’t relish the task. Somehow, the more absurd and low-key the assignment, the more trouble he tends to attract. This time, however, he’s really destined to go to the dogs.

When a restaurateur dies suspiciously, Bognor is forced to eat his way to the truth.Dinner service is over, the staff has left, and Escoffier Savarin Smith is about to tuck into a couple of bottles of champagne. He seals the windows with electrical tape, fiddles with a canister of gas, and begins to drink. When his staff arrives the next morning to open the restaurant, the champagne is drunk, the air has been poisoned, and the greatest chef in England is dead—seemingly by his own hand. For Board of Trade investigator Simon Bognor, this is a crushing blow. Although he moves through life in a permanent state of near-bafflement, Bognor knows his way around a restaurant, and Smith's was the finest in Britain. It was also a clearinghouse for international espionage, which may have led to the chef's peculiar demise. Although usually hesitant to put himself in danger, for once Bognor is unafraid. After all, there are great meals at stake. 'Dazzling and star-spangled \[prose\].' -Dorothy B. Hughes, author of In a Lonely Place 'Crime with a P.G. Wodehouse flair.' -Chicago Tribune 'A constant pleasure.' -The Daily Telegraph

In the 1970s Heald spent a year as an Associate Editor on Weekend Magazine in Toronto, Canada. Ever keen to recycle such experiences Heald sent Simon Bognor to Canada on a mission to solve the murder of a tycoon who bore at least a marginal resemblance to Canada's own Lord Beaverbrook with just a whiff of Conrad Black. The Canadian jokes amused his Canadian audience but eluded most British and Americans!

Nog één reünie, dacht hij bij zichzelf, een afscheid met de jaargenoten die nog leefden. Hij frummelde aan zijn das, die zat te strak, hij bleef staan, wankelde even, greep naar de leuning om steun... Simon Bognor wordt de ochtend na de reünie wakker met een mond als schuurpapier en een houten hoofd. De Master van Apocrypha is niet zo gelukkig. Zijn oppasser vindt hem onderaan de trap. Hij is, natuurlijk, uitermate dood. Bognor, de detective die zo onbekwaam lijkt, krijgt de opdracht de zaak uit te zoeken.

Simon Bognor takes a holiday from the Board of Trade to visit the village of Herring St George and observe the ancient custom of the Popinjay Clout—a colorful mix of food, drink and a bit of longbow shooting. All is going well until the VAT inspector is discovered pinned to a tree by arrows. A character in this novel is Sir Nimrod Herring, a name Heald found on a headstone in the Civil War cemetery in Richmond Virginia but which many critics thought impossibly far-fetched. This is a sort of pastiche of the traditional Golden Age whodunnit except that the traditional English village has been updated to the second half of the twentieth century - with disastrous results.

Bognor tries to understand how a publishing magnate could have been crushed by smut. Before retiring for the night, Vernon Hemlock pours a brandy, lights a cigar, and takes a look at his cache of pornography. Far more than a wad of dirty magazines stashed under a mattress, this is a collection of some of the world's finest erotica, dating back as far as a dirty doodle drawn by da Vinci. The millionaire publisher is perusing the Swedish section when the shelves begin to move. By the time he notices the walls closing in on him, it is too late. Vernon Hemlock has been flattened by filth. This would not normally bother Simon Bognor, but he fears it will be bad news for his book deal. A stridently lazy Board of Trade investigator, Bognor stumbled his way into a handshake deal with Hemlock to write a kind of memoir. With his publisher dead, Bognor has no choice but to find the man who squashed the king of porn and confront his own greatest fear: hard work. 'Dazzling and star-spangled \[prose\].' - Dorothy B. Hughes, author of In a Lonely Place'Crime with a P.G. Wodehouse flair.' - Chicago Tribune 'A constant pleasure.' - The Daily Telegraph

Along the canals of Venice, Bognor investigates a mogul s medieval murder Flush with cash from the success of his latest insipid blockbuster, aspiring film mogul Irving Silverburger takes to Venice to soak himself in luxury. Instead, he is quickly soaked in blood. Cruising down the canal in a vaporetto, Silverburger is shot with a crossbow, killed by a Harlequin who disappears into the masquerade of Carnival. Unmasking the disguised assassin falls to Simon Bognor, a British Board of Trade detective whose natural sloth did not prevent him from stumbling backward into knighthood an honor that fits just as poorly as his ill-tailored clothes. If he ever had a prime, he is long past it now, but Bognor must rally once more to penetrate the mysteries of an ancient city at festival time, when the killers are not the only ones in disguise."