The question taxing Detective Inspector Purbright’s brain was whether anything untoward had been going on in the tiny village of Mumblesby. Certainly the circumstances surrounding the death of ‘Rich ...

The appreciation of antique objects is not perhaps Detective Sergeant Sidney Love’s forte , yet his critical appraisal of Lot Thirty-Four - comprising two golf balls, an LMS railway tumbler, an ...

For lovely Julia Harton, unhappily married to a brutally successful pet food executive, a dramatic death in the fairground seems to provide a deliciously easy means of escape. But for ...

A car mowing its way through Flaxborough market (and almost over Constable Cowdry) dramatically signals the presence of fearless, crusading journalist - Clive Grail, bent on uncovering scandal in that town ...

‘Two Naked Nuns Available Philadelphia’ is the strangest cable ever to come to Flaxborough. Inspector Purbright, who has coped with a few odd things in his time, finds it opens ...

‘One of the most consistently busy of Britain’s home industries during the past fifty years has been the manufacture of crime fiction. Some three hundred writers now contribute, more ...

‘She pranced towards the edge of the clearing, swerved and came back for another fire vault. Her hands moved in gestures of sinuous supplication ... Then Mrs Pentatuke would halt on ...

The Flaxborough Crab was first published in 1969, although its title in the US was Just What the Doctor Ordered , and is the sixth novel in the Flaxborough series.

H ...

Within the quiet respectable market town of Flaxborough lurks a dangerous criminal: someone who has no compunction in committing horrific crimes. A secret agent has been murdered in unsavoury circumstances ...

My Dear Friend ... I am in great danger. The person whose loyal and faithful companion I have been ... intends to have me done away with ...

When this unsigned letter is ...

Right at the bottom of the column, it was.
Something for which she had not dared to hope. Not in remote, prosperous, hard-headed Flaxborough.
A matrimonial bureau.

Two women have ...

Described by Cecil Day-Lewis as ‘a great lark, full of preposterous situations and pokerfaced wit’ Coffin Scarcely Used is Colin Watson’s first Flaxborough novel and was originally published in ...

Detective Inspector Purbright of the Flaxborough police force is used to a life of quietude in a small market town, yet he knows that behind the outward respectability of typical ...