Bodies from the Library 3: Forgotten Stories of Mystery and Suspense by the Queens of Crime and Other Masters of Golden Age Detective

This anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together eighteen tales from the golden age of detective fiction for the first time in audiobook form.

The golden age of detective fiction had begun inauspiciously with the publication of E. C. Bentley's schismatic Trent's Last Case in 1913, but it hit its stride in 1920 when both Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts--later crowned queen and king of the genre--had crime novels published for the first time. They ushered in two decades of exemplary mystery writing, the era of the whodunit, the impossible crime. and the locked-room mystery, with stories that have thrilled and baffled generations of readers.

This new volume in the Bodies from the Library series features the work of eighteen prolific authors who, like Christie and Crofts, saw their popularity soar during the golden age. Aside from novels, they all wrote short fiction--stories, serials and plays--and although most of them have been collected in books over the last 100 years, here are the ones that got away.

In this audiobook you will encounter classic series detectives including Colonel Gore, Roger Sheringham, Hildegarde Withers, and Henri Bencolin; Hercule Poirot solves "The Incident of the Dog's Ball;" and Dorothy L. Sayers' chilling "The House of the Poplars" is published for the first time.

With a full-length novella by John Dickson Carr, this diverse collection concludes with some early "flash fiction" commissioned by Collins' Crime Club in 1938. Each mini story had to feature an orange, resulting in six very different tales from Peter Cheyney, Ethel Lina White, David Hume, Nicholas Blake, John Rhode, and--in his only foray into writing detective fiction--the publisher himself, William Collins.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1923-1957) was an English-born author of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, reviews, and translations. She is best known for her detective fiction, considered among the classics of the genre, and for her amateur detective character, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She died in 1976.

Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982), born in New Zealand, wrote over thirty detective novels. Many of her stories had theatrical settings, as her real passion was for the theater. She was both an actress and a producer and almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public's interest in live theater. In 1966 she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.