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Obelists En Route

By C. Daly King
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Brief Description
A cross-country train journey where everyone is a suspect. An investigator with a love of puzzles. A Golden Age classic, perfect for summer. First published in 1937, a Golden Age classic murder mystery set on a cross-country train. Obelists En Route is a highly ingenious, entertaining... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2800
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A cross-country train journey where everyone is a suspect. An investigator with a love of puzzles. A Golden Age classic, perfect for summer.

First published in 1937, a Golden Age classic murder mystery set on a cross-country train.

Obelists En Route is a highly ingenious, entertaining and unusual tale - Daily Herald.

The luxurious Transcontinental Express, a locomotive journeying coast-to-coast across the United States, is the height of 1930s technology and sophistication. Alongside carriages for dining, drinking and dancing, there's even a swimming pool car. And it's there, just one day into the journey, that the corpse of a banker is found.

With a killer on the train, the passengers soon begin to turn on one another. It's up to the clever Dr Pons - with his sharp wit and knack for impossible puzzles - to get to the bottom of the case, even as every new piece of evidence seems to suggest more perplexing possibilities.

'Ingenious . . . A satisfyingly complex solution to both crimes' - Booklist.

'Extravagantly brainy, gloriously dated' - Kirkus.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781804999479

Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 11 June 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin (Transworld)

Contributors:

  • Introduction by Otto Penzler

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 26.0mm

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 280g

Pages: 384

Collections

C. Daly King Classic Crime & Mystery Fiction Classic Fiction Crime & Thriller Fiction General Fiction Penguin Books

About the Author

C. Daly King (Author) C. Daly King (1895-1963) was an American psychologist and detective story writer. He was born in New York City and educated at Yale University. After fighting in World War I, he worked in textiles and in advertising before returning to school to study psychology, with a particular focus on sleep and consciousness. In the 1930s, King published nine books that quickly established him as a master of the Golden Age mystery, but ceased writing fiction with the advent of World War II. Otto Penzler (Introducer) Otto Penzler owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and founded the Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books. He has written and edited several books, including the Edgar Award-winning Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, and is the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories of the Year.

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    Obelists At Sea
    Obelists At Sea by C. Daly King is a forgotten Golden Age classic—a puzzling murder mystery set aboard a luxury transatlantic liner, making it the perfect holiday read. A forgotten Golden Age classic, set aboard a luxury transatlantic cruise liner—the perfect holiday read! 'Unusually puzzling ... highly enthralling' - New York Times The lights go off aboard the luxury transatlantic...
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    The magnificent Transcontinental Express, showcasing the cutting edge of mid-1930s luxury train travel, is making its first trip from New York to San Francisco. For its record-breaking maiden voyage—coast to coast in three days with no passenger stops—the express carries only invited guests, among them renowned businessmen, physicians, psychologists, and even a high-ranking member of the NYPD. Among refined staterooms,...
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