The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

First appearance by author turned sleuth Roger Sheringham

The paperback edition of The
Layton Court Mystery

The Layton Court Mystery, published in 1925, was the first detective novel by journalist Anthony Berkeley Cox, who was to become one of the founding members of the elite Detection Club.

His series detective, Roger Sheringham, is one of the guests at a country house party being held at a Jacobean mansion called Layton Court. The character, who is an author, was to feature in another ten detective novels and many short stories by Berkeley.

The party is being hosted by Victor Stanworth, a genial and hospitable man, aged about 60, who has taken Layton Court for the summer to enable him to entertain his friends in style.

At the start of the book, Sheringham has been enjoying Stanworth’s generous hospitality for three days until the party is given the grim news during breakfast that their host appeared to have locked himself in the library and shot himself.

Sheringham is not convinced that his host has committed suicide and sets out to investigate the mystery himself, using his friend, Alec Grierson, who is also in the party, as his ‘Watson’.

Anthony Berkeley was just one of the pen names used by Anthony Berkeley Cox, who died 51 years ago today (9 March 1971). He also wrote novels under the names Francis Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.

Anthony Berkeley Cox helped found the Detection Club in 1930, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. It was to become an elite dining club for British mystery writers, which met in London, under the presidency of G. K. Chesterton. There was an initiation ritual and an oath had to be sworn by new members promising not to rely on Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God in their work.

Berkeley Cox wrote 19 crime novels
before returning to journalism

In The Layton Court Mystery, Sheringham does not conceal anything from his friend, Alec Grierson, and therefore the reader has the same information to help them solve the crime as the detective himself.

I found The Layton Court Mystery unexciting and stilted at the beginning, but the writing improved a lot as the book progressed.

I thought Roger Sheringham had the potential to be a good character, although some of the rather fatuous dialogue at the beginning reminded me of Lord Peter Wimsey at the start of Whose Body?  the first novel by Dorothy L Sayers that he appeared in.

Sheringham sometimes tells Grierson what detectives in books would do in particular circumstances, showing that the character, like his creator Berkeley, is a devotee of the genre.

The amateur detective jumps to a few wrong conclusions along the way and follows up each of his theories until he accepts that they are disproved. He tells the other characters that he is asking questions because he has ‘natural curiosity’, to cover up the fact he is interrogating people he doesn’t really know, which was not considered good form at the time.

He sometimes says he is looking for material for his next novel and one of the characters actually says to him: ‘Everything’s “copy” to you, you mean?’

He also finds clues, such as a footprint, a hair, a piece of a broken vase and a trace of face powder, to help him work out what has taken place in the library.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case
sold more than a million copies

Anthony Berkeley Cox was born in Watford in 1893 and educated at Sherborne School and University College, Oxford. After serving as an officer in the First World War, he began writing for magazines, such as Punch and The Humorist.

He wrote 19 crime novels between 1925 and 1939 before returning to journalism and writing for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. From 1950 to 1970, the year before he died, he contributed to the Manchester Guardian, later, the Guardian newspaper.

Berkeley’s amateur detective, Sheringham, had his most famous outing in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was published in 1929. The novel received rapturous reviews and sold more than one million copies. It is now regarded as a classic of the Golden Age of detective fiction. 

At times, The Layton Court Mystery reminded me of Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913, which was originally intended to be a skit on the detective story genre. Like Trent, Sheringham doesn’t actually solve the case until the real murderer confesses to him right at the end.

However, by the end of The Layton Court Mystery, I had taken to Roger Sheringham and I now look forward to reading the next book in the series.

The Layton Court Mystery was first published in London by Herbert Jenkins in 1925 and in New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1929. It was republished by Spitfire Publications Ltd in 2021. 

Anthony Berkeley's books are available from and 

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Dame Ngaio Marsh had a lifetime love of the theatre

A detective novelist who brilliantly describes backstage life
 

Ngaio Marsh, who was one of the leading female detective novelists of her time, died on this day – 18 February – in 1982 in her native New Zealand.

Ngaio began writing detective novels in 1931 after moving to London to start up an interior decorating business.  Stuck in her basement flat on a very wet Saturday afternoon she decided to have a go at writing a detective story and came up with the idea for her sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective.

Ngaio Marsh came to be seen as
one of the Queens of Crime

She sat down to write what was to be the first of a series of 32 crime novels featuring Alleyn, who she named after an Elizabethan actor, Edward Alleyn. Her detective was to work for the Metropolitan Police in London, even though he is the younger brother of a baronet.

Her second novel, Enter a Murderer, published in 1935, and several others, are set in the world of the theatre, which Ngaio knew well as she was also an actress, director and playwright at times during her life.

After leaving school she had studied painting before joining a touring theatre company. She became a member of an art association in New Zealand and continued to exhibit her paintings with them from the 1920s onwards.

Ngaio allows her detective, Alleyn, to meet and fall in love with an artist, Agatha Troy, in her 1938 novel, Artists in Crime.

She directed many productions of Shakespeare’s plays in New Zealand and Australia and the 430-seat Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand is named in her honour.

In her 1946 short story, I Can Find My Way Out, which features Alleyn, Ngaio once again uses the theatre as her setting. A new playwright, Anthony Gill, is waiting nervously for the premiere of his first play at The Jupiter Theatre in London.

The female lead, Coralie Bourne, has been kind to him and advised him on his play, but the male lead, Canning Cumberland, is known to have a drinking problem and can be unpredictable, which worries Gill. Two of the other actors also resent Cumberland, one because he was given the best part and the other because he was given the best dressing room.

Meanwhile, Roderick Alleyn and his now wife Troy are entertaining a friend, Lord Michael Lamprey, for dinner. He is keen to join the police but his conversation with Alleyn is constantly interrupted by phone calls that are actually meant for a delivery firm. When one of the callers asks if they can deliver a suitcase to playwright  Anthony Gill at the Jupiter Theatre, Lord Michael thinks it would be fun to take the job as he has been unable to get a ticket to see the play.

Sophie Hannah's collection of
stories is published by Apollo

Before he reaches the theatre, the case falls open and he discovers a false ginger beard and moustache, a black hat, a black overcoat with a fur collar and a pair of black gloves.

On an impulse Lord Michael puts the whole outfit on and insists on being allowed to deliver the case in person to the playwright backstage.

As Coralie makes one of her exits from the stage, she sees him standing in the wings wearing the beard and black clothes and faints. The male lead, Cumberland, also reacts with horror when he sees him and locks himself in his dressing room.

Lord Michael continues to watch the play from the wings with fascination, although he becomes increasingly aware of the smell of gas. Eventually, he traces the smell to one of the dressing rooms, gains access and drags out the unconscious occupant, but sadly it is too late to save him.

He rings Alleyn and the detective arrives at the theatre with his men, where it does not take him long to discover that one of the actors has been murdered.

In just 18 pages, Ngaio sets up the story, establishes the characters and their relationships, brilliantly describes the dressing rooms, equipment and atmosphere backstage, drawing on her experience of the theatre, and allows Alleyn to solve the crime.

I Can Find My Way Out is among a collection of stories chosen by the author Sophie Hannah entitled Deadlier: 100 of the Best Crime Stories Written by Women. The compilation is also available in hardback. 

Along with her fellow Queens of Crime, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio was to dominate the genre of crime fiction from the 1930s onwards with her novels, short stories and plays.

In 1948 Ngaio was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in connection with drama and literature in New Zealand. She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts in the 1966 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Ngaio’s autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew was published in 1965. She was inducted into the Detection Club in 1974 and received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement as a detective novelist from the Mystery Writers of America.

Her 32nd and final Alleyn novel, Light Thickens, was completed only a few weeks before her death. The story revolves around one of her greatest theatrical passions, Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth.

Ngaio died in her home town of Christchurch and was buried at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Mount Peel.

The Ngaio Marsh Award is given annually to the writer of the best New Zealand mystery, crime or thriller novel. Her home in Christchurch is now a museum and displays her collection of antiques. On her desk lies her fountain pen filled with green ink, which was her preferred writing tool.

Ngaio Marsh’s 32 Roderick Alleyn crime novels and her collections of short stories are available in a variety of formats from or

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The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell

Sleepy village provides interesting material for Freud follower Mrs Bradley

The Saltmarsh Murders was
the fourth Mrs Bradley mystery

The Vicar’s maid is strangled only a few days after giving birth to an illegitimate baby that no one has ever seen in The Saltmarsh Murders, the fourth novel to feature the psychoanalyst and amateur detective Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.

Conveniently, Mrs Bradley is staying at the Manor House in the village of Saltmarsh, as a guest of the local squire and she is only too happy to lend a hand with the murder inquiry.

As a professional psychiatrist and follower of Freud, Mrs Bradley finds a wealth of interesting cases in the village to test her theories on. She encounters a female resident who believes everyone in the village is some kind of animal and meets the bizarre inhabitants of a remote bungalow who have imprisoned their neighbour in the crypt of the church.

The story is told from the point of view of the young curate, Noel Wells, who lives at the vicarage and is in love with Daphne, the Vicar’s niece.

Mrs Bradley adopts Noel as her ‘Watson’, asking him to introduce her to some of the families in the village and also to provide her with secretarial assistance.

Noel is both terrified and fascinated by Mrs Bradley. He admires her brains and beautiful voice, but he hates being prodded in the ribs by her yellowed talons and is unnerved by her sinister cackle. Seeing Mrs Bradley through his eyes, when he does not completely understand her theories or why she is behaving the way she does, is amusing and also a clever device by Gladys Mitchell to keep the mystery going until the end of the book.

Some of the Mrs Bradley novels
were adapted as a BBC TV series

Mrs Bradley’s investigation uncovers a smuggling racket and involves a corpse going missing, the vicar being locked up in the village pound and an exhumation being ordered, before peace can be restored to the sleepy village of Saltmarsh.

The book reveals a lot of interesting detail about life in England at the beginning of the 1930s. As a schoolteacher, Gladys is able to portray children and young people very well and, as in her first three books, she uses them as main characters.

Gladys wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Bradley, as well as mystery novels under the pen name Malcolm Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the pen name Stephen Hockaby.

She got off the mark in 1929 with Speedy Death, which introduced Mrs Bradley, and she never looked back, writing at least one novel a year throughout her career and gradually building a large and loyal following for her eccentric but brilliant detective.

Gladys was an early member of The Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton and Dorothy L Sayers, but frequently satirised or reversed the traditional patterns of the genre in her novels.

In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but continued to write. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976.

The last Mrs Bradley mystery was published in 1984, the year after the author’s death in Corfe Mullen, a village in Dorset.

The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell was first published in 1932 but has been republished by Vintage Books and is now available as a paperback or Kindle edition.

It is available from: or

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The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

Second Mrs Bradley mystery is full of the unexpected

The Mystery of a Butcher's
Shop is published by Vintage

Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley seems even more eccentric in the second novel by Gladys Mitchell to feature the psycho-analyst detective heroine, with her gaudy clothes, birdlike appearance and sinister cackle.

Mrs Bradley has arrived in the village of Wandles Parva as the tenant of the Stone House at a time when the local squire has just gone missing and a dismembered human body has turned up at a nearby butcher’s shop, the joints left neatly hanging on meat hooks.

She quickly becomes involved in the investigation, irritating the police, employing the young people in the village to help her with detecting, and getting so close to the truth at one point that she narrowly avoids being shot in the head with an arrow fired by a figure clad in full Robin Hood costume.

While the young people think she is entertaining and a good sport, the adults in the village find her unsettling, with her yellow skin, claw-like hands and terrifying grin.

Mrs Bradley is presented with some bizarre clues, such as a human skull discovered by the local Bishop, which then goes missing before turning up as an exhibit in the local museum. There is also a freshly dug grave containing only a suitcase holding a stuffed trout with a note saying: ’A present from Grimsby.’

The police fix on Jim Redsey, a young man who will inherit his missing cousin’s estate, as their main suspect, but Mrs Bradley thinks the psychology is all wrong and that Jim is not creative enough to think of dismembering a body in a butcher’s shop or playing hide-the-thimble with a skull.

Diana Rigg played the eccentric
detective in a BBC TV series

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop is both entertaining and complex with a very tangled plot that Gladys Mitchell and Mrs Bradley both try to help the reader to solve. There are hand-drawn maps and the reader is treated to extracts from Mrs Bradley’s notebook as well as a timetable of events she has drawn up.

While the police remain baffled, Mrs Bradley assembles the interested parties and builds up a case against each suspect in turn and then subsequently tears it down, giving the reader all the facts to help them solve the mystery.

Gladys Mitchell, however, keeps the reader guessing right to the very last paragraph on the very last page.

The author had a long career as a teacher alongside her writing. She also studied the works of Sigmund Freud and developed an interest in witchcraft. She wrote 66 crime novels and was an early member of the Detection Club with other Golden Age detective novelists, but her writing style, characters and plots make her novels unlike anything produced by her contemporaries.

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop was first published in Great Britain in 1930 by Gollanz and was republished in 2010 and 2017 by Vintage Books.

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How Sigmund Freud inspired detective novelist Gladys Mitchell

Writer explored her own interests in her novels and short stories

Gladys Mitchell wrote novels
alongside a career in teaching

Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1983 of Gladys Mitchell, who was once regarded as one of the top three British women detective writers. 

She wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, as well as mystery novels under the pen name, Malcolm Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the pen name, Stephen Hockaby.

A teacher by profession, Gladys wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career.

She got off the mark in 1929 with Speedy Death, which introduced Mrs Bradley, and she never looked back, gradually building a large and loyal following for her eccentric, but brilliant, detective.

Gladys was an early member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton and Dorothy L Sayers, but frequently satirised or reversed the traditional patterns of the genre.

Gladys studied the works of Sigmund Freud and made her series detective, Mrs Bradley, a distinguished psychoanalyst. She also developed an interest in witchcraft, which features in some of her novels.

In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but continued to write her detective novels. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976.

Gladys Mitchell's story, Our Pageant,
is included in Serpents in Eden

The last Mrs Bradley mystery was published in 1984, the year after the author’s death in Corfe Mullen, a village in Dorset, at the age of 82.

Gladys was interested in architecture, ancient buildings, folklore and British customs, themes that were often explored in her novels and short stories.

She originally published many of her short stories in the Evening Standard, but they are now being made available to detective fiction fans again in the anthologies published by the author Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics series.

Our Pageant, a story by Gladys Mitchell first published in the Evening Standard in the 1950s, is included in Serpents in Eden, a volume of countryside crime stories published in 2016.

The story does not feature Mrs Bradley, but it reflects the author’s enthusiasm for British customs. It is very short, only four pages in total, but Gladys makes every word count and there is, of course, a twist at the end. It is well worth the read.

Books by Gladys Mitchell are available fromand  

Books by Martin Edwards are available from and 

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How Dorothy L Sayers used her novels to promote the role of women in society

Shrewd observer of human nature who became a Queen of Crime

Dorothy L Sayers was keen to
promote the role of women 

One of the greatest detective novelists of the Golden Age, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, was born 128 years ago today on June 13, 1893 in Oxford.

Dorothy went to the Godolphin School in Salisbury, where she won a scholarship to Somerville College in Oxford. She graduated with first class honours in modern languages in 1915 and was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University.

She worked for Blackwell’s, the Oxford publishers, and then as a copywriter at Bensons, a London advertising agency.

Dorothy produced her first novel, Whose Body, introducing her amateur detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, in 1923. He was to feature in 14 novels and volumes of short stories.

She became a member, and eventually president, of the Detection Club, where she met other crime writers she admired, such as E C Bentley and G K Chesterton.

Dorothy was a keen observer of human nature and was passionate about the education of women and their right to play a positive role in society, as is evident in her third Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Unnatural Death, published in 1927.

Wimsey was played by Ian 
Carmichael in the BBC series

Unnatural Death also broke new ground in that one of the main characters, Mary Whittaker, has been described as the most clearly delineated homosexual character in Golden Age detective fiction, despite the word ‘lesbian’ never being used by the author to describe her.

Mary Whittaker is seen during the novel trying to entice a young girl into a life of homosexuality and, in a scene where Wimsey kisses her, she is shown to be physically revolted by being kissed by a man.

Dorothy also invented an ingenious murder method in the novel, the injection of an air bubble with a hypodermic syringe into the victim, so that there was no obvious cause of death and a post mortem examination would lead to the conclusion that the victim had died of natural causes.

Some critics found fault with this method, while acknowledging it was very cunning. It was believed Dorothy came up with the idea because of her familiarity with motor engines, having had a relationship with a car mechanic and motor bike enthusiast.

She also made use of brand new legislation on inheriting property, introduced in 1925 in England, for the motive for the murder.

Dorothy’s belief that women should be seen to be playing important roles is reflected in her character Miss Katherine Climpson, who she introduces for the first time in Unnatural Causes as a genteel spinster who helps Wimsey with some of his investigations.

Unnatural Death has been published
in a new edition by Hodder

Lord Peter says he employs Miss Climpson as an enquiry agent because her talents are being wasted by a stupid social system that forces unmarried women to become ‘companions’ rather than use their skills and minds in a more useful and profitable way.

The novel begins in the most casual way with Lord Peter and his friend, a Scotland Yard detective, Charles Parker, discussing a murder investigation while having dinner in a restaurant and being overheard by a doctor sitting at the next table, who eventually joins them and tells them about the unexpected death of a woman he had been treating.

Lord Peter is convinced the woman has been murdered and, dragging the reluctant Parker along with him, sets out to investigate with no clues to work on. Unnatural Death, a groundbreaking, gripping story, with plenty of twists and turns and some shrewd observations of human nature that even reminded me of Jane Austen, is the fascinating result.

After World War II, Dorothy taught herself old Italian and made a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy using terza rima, the three-line rhyming scheme that he used in the original . In 1957, while working on Dante’s third volume, Paradiso, Dorothy died of heart failure. Her friend, Dr Barbara Reynolds, completed her work, which she herself had regarded as her greatest achievement.

Unnatural Death was reprinted in 2016 by Hodder and Stoughton and is available from or

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G K Chesterton’s intuitive Father Brown

Innocent detective learnt his trade from hours spent in confessional box

Father Brown creator G K Chesterton
was the first president of the Detection Club

The brilliant writer G K Chesterton earned his place in the history of crime fiction by creating Father Brown, an unusual amateur detective, who as an unassuming Catholic priest is well aware of the frailties of human nature.

Father Brown appeared in 53 short stories between 1910 and 1936. He solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and his keen understanding of human nature.

The author, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born in 1874 - 147 years ago today (29 May) - in Kensington in London. He became a philosopher, lay theologian and literary and art critic and was a prolific writer.  He is estimated to have written about 80 books, many on theology and literary criticism, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, some appearing in the form of newspaper columns, and several plays.

He was baptised into the Church of England but entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922. Chesterton is said to have loosely based Father Brown on the Right Reverend Monsignor John O’Connor, a parish priest who was involved in Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism.

Chesterton was elected as the first president of the Detection Club and served from 1930 to 1936 until he was succeeded by his good friend, the crime writer E C Bentley. He opened his novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, with a poem written to Bentley.

The first Father Brown story is
included in this collection

Despite his many other literary works, Chesterton will always be remembered as the creator of Father Brown, a character who became so popular that many films and TV series have been made about him.

Father Brown made his first appearance in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post in July 1910 in the short story, The Blue Cross. This story, and others written later, came out in book form in The Innocence of Father Brown.

Shabby and lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, dropping his umbrella and unable to control the parcels he is carrying, Father Brown seems an improbable sleuth but his innocence is probably the secret of his success.

At the end of the story, The Blue Cross, he delivers a master criminal into the hands of the French detective who has been pursuing him. The criminal, Flambeau, and the master detective, Valentin, both bow to him in recognition of his superior detection skills. At this point, ’the little Essex priest blinked about for his umbrella.’

The master criminal, who has been disguised as a Catholic priest, cannot believe Father Brown has seen through him and has outwitted him and asks him to explain how he did it.

Father Brown replies: ‘Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.’

‘What?’ asked the thief, almost gaping.

‘You attacked reason,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s bad theology.’

This made me think of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who explains to the police at the end of each novel why she discovered the murderer before they did. Also seeming very innocent, she made her first appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930. I am fairly certain that Agatha Christie, who was also a leading light in the Detection Club, must have been a Father Brown fan.

The Blue Cross appears in The Innocence of Father Brown and The Complete Father Brown Stories.

Novels and short stories by G K Chesterton are available from or

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