As Travers's finger touched the dead hand, he felt the warmth, and wondered if the man were still alive. Then he saw the knife that stuck sideways in the ribs. It was three years after Ludovic Travers had acquired a painting by the famous contemporary French artist, Henri Larne, that a mysterious art dealer named Braque turned up, showed great interest in the picture, and invited Travers to visit him in Paris. But all Travers saw of Braque in Paris...

"Murder is easy. It's child's play to commit murder and get away with it." Unpleasant uncle Hubert is murdered, while playing cards-and surrounded by any number of relatives, who stand to gain by his death. An impossible crime, it seems, though it turns out three of his nephews were intending to despatch the old tyrant anyway! In this classic country house whodunit, the redoubtable Ludovic Travers will have to wade through a quagmire of clues and...

"And that's not all. Somers is dead too...He poisoned himself...in the lounge!" When the wealthy Cosmo Revere is, killed by a falling tree, ex-CID officer John Franklin and Ludovic Travers chance to be staying in the vicinity. After examining the scene, Franklin determines it was no accident. At the family lawyer's request Franklin and Travers, go undercover at Fenwold Hall, where the dramatis personae, among others, include a bewitching niece, a...

"Send someone here quick. There's been a murder!" Mr Lewton is dead. Stabbed through the back, no possibility of suicide-and no sign of a knife either. The deceased made a phone call summoning a doctor immediately before his own death. And the servant who supposedly reported the murder wasn't even at the scene of the crime, and denies all knowledge. These are among the bizarre opening features of a classic labyrinthine whodunit from a master of the...

Old Hunt slithered in the most amazing way and then fell to the floor. He lay between the seats, face upwards. Ludovic Travers is on his way by train from Toulon to Marignac. Along for the ride are several suspicious characters, two of whom die en route. Although the murders seem at first unrelated, Travers is able to prove the connection between the two, while diverting the eye of official suspicion from himself. After Travers learns that one of...

"Is he bad, sir?" "Worse than that," I said. "In fact, he's dead." 1943. Ludovic Travers, consulting specialist for Scotland Yard, is on a fortnight's well-earned leave in London from his military posting. Anticipating relaxation, he is instead, thrown into a fresh mystery by a letter from one Peter Worrack, the owner of a genteel gambling club. Worrack's business partner, Georgina, has disappeared. Or, has she? Ludo rapidly has doubts, but the reasons...

Near the right temple was a hole, and down the forehead and along the nose was dried blood. "Shot, by God! No wonder the poor old devil couldn't hear." When the telephone bell rings in Bill Ellice's Broad Street Detective Agency, it happens to be Ludovic Travers who takes the call. The new client is certainly out of the ordinary, for he claims that his life is in danger. He wants the firm to trace a nephew who would be a protection. Travers finds...

Enough words and enough speed and you can get away with murder. There was something unique about the Case of the Treble Twist. It isn't often one gets a preview of a case or hovers round its fringes four years before it breaks, but that was just what happened here. The preview began the evening Ludovic Travers had a drink with Chief Inspector Jewle, and first heard the name of Harry Tibball, suspect involved in a series of big-scale robberies. Then...

"You'll face two charges," I said. "One for murder and one for extortion." Ludovic Travers remembered Brian Jedmont as a photographer whose ambition outran his sense of ethics. The Broad Street Detective Agency had stopped using his services in unfortunate circumstances, and Travers was accordingly surprised when one day Jedmont turned up at the office anxious to become a client on his own account. Specifically, he wanted Travers to investigate an...

"Have you heard the news, sir?" the waiter said. "I'm afraid I haven't. What is it?" "Plumley's dead, sir. Henry Plumley. We just got the news over the 'phone. Suicide they say it was. Anything else you want, sir?" Out-of-print for over nine decades and one of the rarest classic crime novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction, The Plumley Inheritance, first of the Ludovic Travers mysteries, is now available in a new edition by Dean Street Press. When...