Mystery conundrums from crime's finest storytellers Presenting 30 impossible mysteries and bizarre crimes guaranteed to fascinate and intrigue. The delight in these stories is unravelling the puzzle and trying to work out what on earth happened. Stories include: • A man alone in an all-glass phone booth, visible on CCTV and with no one near him, is killed by an ice pick. • a man sitting alone in a room is shot by a bullet fired only once and that was over 200 years ago. • A man enters a cable-car carriage alone and is visible the entire journey but is found dead when he reaches the bottom. • A man vanishes at the top of the Indian rope trick and is found dead miles away. • a dead man continues to receive mail in response to letters apparently written by him after he'd died. The anthology includes several brand new stories never previously published, plus a range of extremely rare stories, many never reprinted since their first appearance in increasingly rare magazines.

This collection of criminal conundrums are more than whodunits, they're howdunits and are intended to stretch your powers of deduction to the limits.

Gossip and rumours begin to circulate in the press concerning Sir Andrew Lewis and the Addleton Barrow. Some claim that the Addleton Barrow has been the subject of evil legends as long as anyone can recall; other sources declare that after Sir Lewis opened the barrow in the village of Addleton, a disease struck the village. Sir Andrew Lewis is a victim of lesions of the skin, headaches, fainting spells, hair loss and eventually his mind is affected, too. Doctors Stamford and Greedom state his condition as an unknown, obscure, tropical disease picked up during his work abroad, and neither doctor is able to save the famous archaeologist from death. Holmes and Watson set out to get to the bottom of the rumours that swirl around this village and it's Black Barrow.

Leading crime critic Maxim Jakubowski presents this year's must-have collection of British crime fiction. This latest volume of the acclaimed annual collection presents over 20 short stories of murder mystery, selected from the very cream of new British crime fiction. Contributors include Lee Child, Colin Dexter, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Len Deighton, John Harvey, and many more. This is an ideal present for anyone who has ever enjoyed a good murder-mystery. A page-turning compendium of British talent to capture the imagination of readers around the world.

Divided into three main sections, "The Ancient World", "The Middle Ages" and "Regency and Gaslight", The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits includes: · The Thief versus Rhampsinitus by Herodotus - probably the earliest detective story ever written. · The Locked Tomb Mystery, set in ancient Egypt, by Elizabeth Peters. · A new story by John Maddox Roberts featuring the young Roman detective Decius Metellus. · Robert van Gulik's ingenious He Came With the Rain featuring Judge Dee, a real-life character who lived inseventh-century China. · A new story by Peter Tremayne, set in seventh-century Ireland and featuring Sister Fidelma. · Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael story The Price of Light. · Paul Harding's The Confession of Brother Athelstan. · A classic locked-room mystery featuring Lillian de la Torre's popular detective Sam Johnson. · A story by Michael Harrison featuring August Dupin, the detective created by Edgar Allan Poe and the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes. · John Dickson Carr's acclaimed The Gentleman from Paris. ...and many more!

This mammoth book brings together some of the modern world's most head-scratching deaths and disappearances, from the murder of rap royalty Tupac Shakur to Princess Diana's car crash in Paris, via the poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko and JFK's assassination. Is it possible that prisoners of war remain left behind in Vietnam? Could the most famous musician in the world stage his own death and recede into an ordinary life? Investigating these quesitons and more, this book is an A-Z of unsolved mysteries, cover-ups, conspiracies and bizarre crimes, bringing together famous names as disparate as Tupac, Elvis, Dr David Kelly, Malcolm X and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Although fantasy and supernatural literature have long and celebrated histories, many critics contend that the fantastic and the supernatural have no place in the logical, rational, world of the detective story. This book is the first extensive study of the fantastic in detective fiction and it explores the highly debated question of whether detective fiction and the fantastic can comfortably coexist. The "locked room" mystery--which often uses the fantastic as a red herring to eventually be debunked by reason and logic--has long been among the most popular subgenres of detective fiction. This book also explores stories featuring almost supernaturally gifted detectives, stories where the supernatural is truly encountered, and stories with ambiguous endings. Close to 500 detective stories from 1841 to 2000, in which the fantastic or supernatural plays a central role, are discussed and analyzed. Although not all the stories are judged to be successful as detective tales, in the great majority, the fantastic enlivens the tale and deepens the mystery without weakening the detective elements.