British Library Crime Classics Books in Order

A poisoned box of chocolates kills Joan Bendix after it was meant, apparently, for Sir Eustace Pennefather. Roger Sheringham’s Crimes Circle offers solution after solution, each persuasive, and each more unsettling than the last.

Richard Temperley barely notices his bad-tempered fellow passenger until the man is shot through a hotel window after their train reaches foggy London. The case begins with one baffling death and opens onto a deeper mystery.

A bad-tempered magistrate is found shot in the Cornish village of Boscawen, with almost no clues to guide the police. Inspector Bigswell and Reverend Dodd must sift village loyalties and old resentments to find the killer.

When a body is found at an isolated garage, the case looks like suicide, until the details start refusing to fit. Meredith follows money troubles, false appearances, and rural gossip through a sharply drawn Lakeland setting.

A missing man, a bloodied hat, and bones turning up in lime deliveries make this one look simple at first. Meredith keeps digging after an apparent confession, and the South Downs case grows stranger and darker.

Bruce Attleton, once a rising novelist, vanishes after a strange phone call from a man named Debrette. His suitcase and papers later surface in a derelict Notting Hill studio called the Belfry, where Macdonald’s search through bohemian studios, bad marriages and possible inheritances leads to a chillingly concealed corpse.

A snowbound train leaves several passengers stranded on Christmas Eve, and they take refuge in a country house that seems recently occupied but utterly empty. Then murder reaches the house, and the holiday turns eerie fast.

A man is killed in his chair by an arrow fired through an open window in a neat Cheltenham square. With archery club members all around him, Meredith faces a locked-in neighborhood full of rivalries and hidden motives.

A glamorous country-house weekend turns sinister after an injured stranger becomes the unlucky thirteenth guest. With paintings slashed, secrets surfacing, and murder in the house, Inspector Kendall has to untangle everyone's past.

A petty thief stumbles on a locked room holding seven bodies, and what looks simple quickly turns baffling. Inspector Kendall and a journalist dig through a mass death that could be suicide, murder, or something stranger.

Miss Ethel Tither has spent years prying into everyone else's sins, so her death shocks the village less than the way she died. Littlejohn faces a crowd of suspects and a flood of small-town gossip.

This omnibus collects two early Littlejohn cases. One reopens an old killing everyone thought was solved, the other follows the murder of a dubious healer with more enemies than patients.

During a foggy evening in the London Blitz, an artist’s studio in Hampstead hosts a portrait sitting and a tense chess game. Next door, an elderly man is found shot and his Canadian soldier nephew arrested, but Macdonald’s investigation into the studio’s occupants and a zealous special constable shows the case is far from simple.

On a remote Lancashire farm during wartime, domineering patriarch Robert Garth is discovered dead among his beloved cattle. Called north from Scotland Yard, Macdonald has to read the rhythms of farm work, inheritance worries and family quarrels before he can identify which of the Garths had murder in mind.

On a blackout night in Regent’s Park, a passer‑by sees a man struck down, lit only by the flare of a match. The victim’s identity proves slippery, leading Macdonald to a theatrical boarding house, black‑market dealings and air‑raid chaos where truth and imposture are hard to separate.

Late in the Second World War, a quiet ex‑naval officer rents a thatched cottage on a Devon estate, hoping to make a new start as a market gardener. When he dies in a suspicious fire amid local schemes for a luxury hotel, Macdonald must decide whether the blaze was tragic accident or calculated murder.

In a forward-looking garden city, the cult of the Children of Osiris is split by jealousy, money, and power. When murder follows, Meredith has to pick his way through rival prophets, private grudges, and spiritual nonsense.

A dead man in a burned London lodging house and a cheerful party of sixteen skiers in the Austrian Alps turn out to be linked. Inspector Julian Rivers must follow a faint trail from Bloomsbury boarding house to snowbound slopes to unmask a killer hiding in holiday high spirits.

Superintendent Meredith heads to the French Riviera to investigate a counterfeiting ring, only for a death at an eccentric Englishwoman's villa to complicate everything. It is a sunny setting with plenty of shadows.

In the North Devon village of Milham, a much‑admired woman known for tireless charity work is found drowned in the mill race. Chief Inspector Macdonald meets a wall of polite silence as he probes behind the saintly reputation to the divisions and resentments hidden in the community.

James Teasdale, an unlucky shopkeeper turned travelling salesman, is found dead in the flooded Dumb River. Littlejohn traces his final journey and uncovers the scandalous company he was keeping.

An explosion kills three directors at a failing joinery firm in a Surrey new town. Littlejohn and Cromwell pick through debts, family feuds, and bitter local grievances to find who turned business trouble into mass murder.

During a foggy drive home from the Fordings Hunt Ball, Nick Brent and Dilys Maine narrowly avoid running over a corpse sprawled in the road. Nick is attacked when he goes to call the police, and an inquiry tangled with an earlier disappearance slowly unravels jealousies and long-held local grudges.