Resorting to Murder

Holidays offer us the luxury of getting away from it all. So, in a different way, do detective stories. This collection of vintage mysteries combines both those pleasures.

From a golf course at the English seaside to a pension in Paris, and from a Swiss mountain resort to the cliffs of Normandy, this new selection shows the enjoyable and unexpected ways in which crime writers have used summer holidays as a theme. These fourteen stories range widely across the golden age of British crime fiction.

Stellar names from the past are well represented—Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton, for instance—with classic stories that have won acclaim over the decades. The collection also uncovers a wide range of hidden gems: Anthony Berkeley—whose brilliance with plot had even Agatha Christie in raptures—is represented by a story so (undeservedly) obscure that even the British Library seems not to own a copy.

The stories by Phyllis Bentley and Helen Simpson are almost equally rare, despite the success which both writers achieved, while those by H. C. Bailey, Leo Bruce, and the little-known Gerald Findler have seldom been reprinted.