There was poison in the chalice when the initiate drank it - but how could it have gotten there? An early puzzle for Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

Generally defined as the years between the two world wars of the 20th century, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction was shaped and defined by the authors who made up Britain's prestigious Detection Club. Martin Edwards tells their story.

Children are being poisoned by belladonna from the berries of the nightshade plant. Henry Gamadge must figure out who is doing it, and how - and why.

Miss Pym is charmed by the students at Leys Physical Training College for Women - until the unthinkable happens.

Here's a collection of classic mystery short stories about vacations - and about sleuths and criminals on vacation, too.

Who murdered American industrialist Horatio Leavenworth? All the evidence seemed to point one way - but it took detective Ebenezer Gryce to discover what was really going on.

The man who went overboard might have murdered somebody. But he had managed to alienate just about everybody who sailed with him on board the ship. Was he really a murderer - or was he somebody else's victim?

Six short stories introducing Reginald Fortune, a doctor pressed into service as a specialist in crime-solving.

Cut off from the rest of the world by a howling blizzard, the guests at Hunting's End were all too aware that there was a murderer among them - and one who would have no hesitation about killing again.

About the only thing Appleby could be sure of was that College President Josiah Umpleby must have been shot by one of the very few people who had keys to the College Grounds - and they were all Fellows of the College...

The dinner guests all heard the sound of the shot. The police thought the killer was easily identified. And then a detective named Colwyn found that it wasn't all as easy as it might seem.

The lovers appeared to have committed suicide together. Just two sets of footprints led from the house to the edge of the cliff. Only when the bodies were recovered from the sea, it became clear that both had been murdered. And that had to be impossible. One of John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson)'s most ingenious plots for Sir Henry Merrivale.

Somebody took a potshot at the Santa Rican Vice Consul in Nice - and managed to kill Major Cartwright instead. Did the wrong man get shot? Jane and Dagobert Brown investigate in this screwball comedy-mystery.

The victim was undoubtedly insane. The murder was most probably justified. So the question, to Roger Sheringham, became: can we fool the police into thinking it was suicide?

The stolen statue of a Minoan snake goddess lures History Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough to a department store magnate's private island off the California coast. He arrives just in time for the murder...

The midget's name was Jay Otto. He loved to make people hate him, just as he hated everybody around him. And if he was trouble when he was alive, wait till you see what happened after he was murdered.

John Rother drove away on vacation - and disappeared. His car was found with bloodstains. And then the bones began turning up. Superintendent Meredith weighs the grim evidence in this Golden Age classic.

It took a trick to persuade Nero Wolfe to get involved in the case. When he did, it proved to be too bad for a determined killer.

Anthropologist Penny Spring and Archeologist Sir Toby Glendower, encounter murder and mystery in the remote Scottish highlands.

Wally Carter may not have been a very good husband to his wife, Ermyntrude - but Inspector Hemingway wondered if there was another reason why somebody decided to shoot him.

Grettry Road was a dead-end street - the perfect place to stumble over the dead body of the air raid warden!

A man is shot dead in his own house - and the investigation is handed over to Damon Gaunt, a blind detective who has never failed to unravel even the most tangled murder case.

Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn tackles a case of blackmail and murder among England's social elites.

Was the killer who terrorize Frazer's Mills a passing psychopath - or someone much closer to home?

Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte must use all his skills, inherited from his Aborigine mother and Caucasian father, to rescue a dangerous group of prisoners and lead them across hundreds of miles of wilderness.

A 1971 outing for Miss Marple when a visitor to nearby Gossington Hall is poisoned - but could the poison have been intended for someone else...

The five families of Crescent Place find their world turned upside down when an elderly woman is found murdered in her bed. A classic in the "Had I But Known" tradition.

The young woman had so many secrets and loved to flaunt her knowledge. It proved to be a dangerous and deadly game.

Passengers escaping a snowbound train at Christmas seek shelter in an unoccupied house...and find murder...

A chance meeting with a Turkish intelligence official sends Charles Latimer into a world of political assassination, espionage, drugs and an international conspiracy.

The thief left a bloody thumbprint behind. It was up to Dr. Thorndyke to prove that the clue pointed in the wrong direction.

Only Albert Campion stands between a gang of murderous thieves and their target - a priceless relic whose loss would be beyond catastrophe.

What starts as a routine traffic accident turns into a murder case for lawyer Perry Mason and his hapless client.

A department store is no place for a murder - too many suspects, far too many customers, and managers who care more about sales figures than dead bodies.

Starlets, gangsters and secrets in the Hollywood of the late 1940s, as Philip Marlowe follows a trail that seems to have an awful lot of dead bodies littering the side of the road.

A classic old-fashioned thriller by Edgar Wallace, where murder isn't necessarily the worst horror to be revealed in the mysterious tomb...

The first of the Judge Dee mysteries written by Van Gulik, the judge must solve three interrelated crimes: the murder in the sealed room, the hidden testament, and the girl with the severed head.

Ellery Queen follows the trail of a murderer whose victims are beheaded and crucified. He'll have to figure out why before he can discover who...

Chief Inspector Hemingway had too much help from the amateur detectives trying to solve the murder. But then, as one character observed, "Between you and me and the gate-post, there’s a bit too much amateur detection going on in Thornden!"

Dr. Gideon Fell plays armchair detective to unravel the mystery of a murder aboard ship, an impossible disappearance, a stolen artifact, some highly compromising film, a dangerous criminal, all adding up to a zany comedy about a deadly serious crime.

Amateur detective Philo Vance finds that a Scottish terrier and some Chinese pottery hold the key to a baffling murder in a locked and bolted room.

Nero Wolfe rarely leaves home - so when he travels to a luxury spa in West Virginia for a gourmet banquet, he is less than pleased to find himself in the middle of a murder case.

Think of it as a "screwball mystery": Shady lawyer John J. Malone, publicity agent Jake Justus and socialite Helene Brand investigate the stabbing murder of a tyrannical old woman in order to clear the name of the victim's niece.

Sir Clinton Driffield investigates a peculiar robbery, a more peculiar murder, and the case of a vanishing thief.

Finding the killer wasn't the hard part for Inspector Meredith - it was finding evidence that had him stumped.

When an elderly woman witnesses a murder through the window of a passing train, nobody believes her - except Miss Jane Marple...

The classic Greek philosopher Aristotle must solve the murder of a wealthy Athenian citizen - and, by doing so, clear the honor and the name of one of his former pupils.

Monsieur Gallet was shot to death. Or perhaps he was stabbed. He was a salesman. Or possibly not. He died in Sancerre. But he should have been in Rouen. So much of what was known about the victim appeared to be wrong. It was quite a puzzle for Inspector Maigret. 

In Victorian times, a curiosity about spiritualism drove many upper-middle class Englishmen and women to experiment with seances and the occult. Sometimes, those seances could cover up other crimes...and when one ends in murder, Sergeant Cribb must determine both who committed the murder - and why.

Fifteen more stories by Edward D. Hoch featuring New England country doctor, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, as he solves locked room mysteries and seemingly impossible crimes.

A forgotten classic of the American Golden Age, Anne Austin's "One Drop of Blood" is the story of a murder in an asylum for mentally ill patients. Was the killer one of the inmates? Or was it all part of an ingenious plot by a very sane murderer?

A classic Golden Age "country house" mystery, originally published in 1937, the family patriarch takes a night-time stroll near a cliff...and falls to his death. Then his heir is shot to death...and HIS heir finds himself under deadly attack...

A vintage Golden Age mystery from 1935, set in Oxford at all-female Persephone College: a group of undergraduates tackle the murder of a most unpopular Bursar.

Sir Henry Merrivale takes on a murderous plot at a British film studio that may involve espionage.

Lord Peter Wimsey is the archetypal Golden Age aristocratic amateur sleuth. In "Whose Body?" he must discover the identity of the man's body found in a bathtub, wearing only a pair of golden pince-nez glasses.

A new Albert Campion mystery, based on the character created by Margery Allingham and continued by her widower, Pip Youngman Carter. When Carter died, he left the first four chapters of a new Campion novel, and author Mike Ripley has now completed that novel - and it's well worth reading.

Biblio expert Henry Gamadge was pretty sure that the lettering which appeared suddenly on an old engraving wasn't supernatural in origin. But he couldn't foresee that it would lead so suddenly to murder.

A terrifying tale of a sort of murder game gone very wrong - one of the most terrifying of Dr. Fell's career.

Meet Miriam Lea, one of the earliest female detectives in fiction. She appeared in this 1888 novel by Leonard Merrick, acting as a private investigator in Mr. Bazalgette's detective agency. Hired to find an absconding banker, she pursues her quarry all the way from England to South Africa - with several surprises along the way.

The people in the ancient village of Saxon Wall had a number of unsavory secrets, which they hid rather imperfectly from any who wandered into the village. It took Mrs. Bradley quite a while to dig out the truths about what was really going on in the village - and who was responsible for some pretty chilling murders.

Professor Quinn was obnoxious, to say the least. But who disliked him enough to poison his coffee? And how did the murderer put the poison in the Professor's cup without anyone seeing it happen? These are just a few of the questions New York City Police Lieutenant Sigrid Harald must answer in order to solve the mystery.

Who would kill to uncover the secret of a small statuette of a Chinese goddess, the goddess of the green shiver?

Judge Dee expected a relaxing few days off when he arrived in Rivertown on his way home. What he found instead was a gruesome murder, the theft of a pearl necklace, and a court intrigue that threatened the foundation of the Chinese empire.

Maigret's first recorded case finds him trying to track a criminal known as "Pietr the Latvian" - who may be a murderer or who may be a murder victim.

The British Library Crime Classics series brings back a mystery by John Bude, a once-popular, now almost completely forgotten author, whose entertaining books deserve a new generation of readers.

Asey Mayo, the "Codfish Sherlock," tackles a murder case at a charity auction on Cape Cod, where the bidders hoped to find hidden treasure - and came up with a corpse instead.

All of Dorothy L. Sayers' short stories are collected here - stories with the aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey, stories with traveling salesman Montague Egg, and a variety of stories of mystery and suspense from one of the best writers of England's Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The murder of Mrs. Rockcliff was a terrible thing. But perhaps even more terrible was the disappearance of the victim's newborn baby - the fifth such disappearance in Mitford. Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte - Bony, to his friends - knew that the baby-snatchings had to take precedence over solving the murder.

An "old battle-ax" of a narrator, Adelaide Adams, tells this story about murder in a hotel in an American southern city. It's a masterpiece of the "Had I But Known" school, told with charm, wit and humor.

What would you do if you had written an unpublished mystery - and somebody used the method of murder in real life that you had created in your mystery? Radio writer Bill Tracy had to figure out who was stealing his ideas - and translating them into real murders.

The art dealer's will had disappeared. Ellery Queen figured it had to be in the dead man's coffin. But when they opened the coffin, they found a lot more than they had bargained for. A classic Ellery Queen puzzle to challenge the reader.

A horseback ride in Central Park proves deadly for a popular model - and Hildegarde Withers and Inspector Piper will find that the noble sport of horse racing plays a critical role in the search for a solution.

Who was the girl on the stairs - and who was the dead woman in the cellar? It was up to Miss Silver to find the truth.

Nero Wolfe investigates the peculiar murder of a chess wizard.

Mr. and Mrs. North take on the killer of a United States senator.