John Dickson Carr

"At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people. But is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing the lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, purloined from a private collection, which Dr. Gideon Fell has just been hired to retrieve? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don't stay stolen for long; each one reappears in unexpected and conspicuous...

Who is the true heir to the Farnleigh estate? Two men claim to be the legal heir. When a meeting is called to determine the legal heir one of the men is found dead in a garden pond. Detective Gideon Fell is put on the case to unmask the murderer and reveal the true heir. Sir John Farnleigh, black sheep of the wealthy Farnleigh clan, nearly perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Nearly 25 years later, Sir John has finally returned home to claim his...

Plague Court is old and crumbling, long neglected after its lord, hangman's assistant Louis Playge, fell victim to the black death hundreds of years before. Famously haunted by Playge's ghost, the property finally has a new owner and banishing the spirit is the first order of business. And when the medium employed with this task is found stabbed to death in a locked stone hut on the grounds, surrounded by an untouched circle of mud, the other guests...

The Starberths die of broken necks' goes the legend in the village of Chatterham . . .' The Starberth family governed the now-abandoned Chatterham prison for many years, and each male heir must spend the night of his twenty-fifth birthday there, alone, overlooking the hanging site of Hag's Nook. Meanwhile, after a chance encounter on a railway platform, Dorothy Starberth and young American graduate Tad Rampole fall in love. Rampole is here in rural...

Also known by its US title The Problem of the Green Capsule, this classic novel is widely regarded as one of John Dickson Carr's masterpieces and remains among the greatest impossible crime mysteries of all time. A sinister case of deadly poisoned chocolates from Sodbury Cross's high street shop haunts the group of friends and relatives assembled at Bellegarde, among the orchards of 'peach-fancier' Marcus Chesney. To prove a point about how the...