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Murder in Piccadilly

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

"This is another entry in the attractive, period-style paperbacks in the British Library Crime Classics series. Pair Murder in Piccadilly with Freeman Wills Crofts' Antidote to Venom, also notable for its psychological acuity and also available in the same series." —Booklist

'Scores of men and women died daily in London, but on this day of days one of them had died in the very midst of a crowd and the cause of his death was a dagger piercing his heart. Death had become something very real.'

When Bobbie Cheldon falls in love with a pretty young dancer at the Frozen Fang night club in Soho, he has every hope of an idyllic marriage. But Nancy has more worldly ideas about her future: she is attracted not so much to Bobbie as to the fortune he expects to inherit.

Bobbie's miserly uncle Massy stands between him and happiness: he will not relinquish the ten thousand a year on which Nancy's hopes rest. When Bobbie falls under the sway of the roguish Nosey Ruslin, the stage is set for murder in the heart of Piccadilly—and for Nancy's dreams to be realised.

When Chief Inspector Wake of Scotland Yard enters the scene, he uncovers a tangled web of love affairs, a cynical Soho underworld, and a motive for murder.

This good-natured vintage mystery novel is now republished for the first time since the 1930s, with an introduction by the award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards, the leading expert on inter-war detective fiction.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 29, 2015
      First published in 1936, this entry in the British Library Crime Classics series by the obscure Kingston (the pen name of Charles Kingston O'Mahoney) is too good to be lost to history. Bobbie Cheldon, an unambitious and broke gentleman of 23, is waiting for his frugal-to-a-fault middle-aged uncle, Massy Cheldon, to die so he can inherit his estate. To add insult to poverty, Nancy Curzon, the gold-digging nightclub dancer Bobbie has fallen for, won't marry a pauper, and Nancy and her theatrical partner, Nosey Ruslin, keep pressuring Bobbie to speed up his route to wealth. The consensus is that Uncle Massy needs to go to his reward so Bobbie can collect what should be hisâboth the cash and the girl. When Uncle Massy gets stabbed in the heart in London's crowded Piccadilly Underground station, it's up to clever Chief Inspector Wake to determine who wielded the blade. The dated plot may be fairly formulaic, but a nice twist at the end is worth the wait.

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  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook
  • Open EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

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