The Floating Admiral

Inspector Rudge does not encounter many cases of murder in the sleepy seaside town of Whynmouth. But when an old sailor lands a rowing boat containing a fresh corpse with a stab wound to the chest, the Inspector's investigation immediately comes up against several obstacles. The vicar, whose boat the body was found in, is clearly withholding information, and the victim's niece has disappeared. There is clearly more to this case than meets the eye - even the identity of the victim is called into doubt. Inspector Rudge begins to wonder just how many people have contributed to this extraordinary crime and whether he will ever unravel it. . .

In 1931 Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and 10 other crime writers from the newly formed Detection Club collaborated in publishing a unique crime novel. In a literary game of consequences, each author would write one chapter, leaving G.K. Chesterton to write a typically paradoxical prologue and Anthony Berkeley to tie up all the loose ends. In addition, all of the authors provided their own solutions in sealed envelopes, all of which appeared at the end of the book, with Agatha Christie's ingenious conclusion acknowledged at the time to be 'enough to make the book worth buying on its own'. The authors of this novel are G.K. Chesterton, Canon Victor Whitechurch, G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley.

1931, 2011 The Detection Club (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

Dame Agatha Christie is the world’s best-known mystery writer. Her books have sold over two billion copies worldwide and have been translated into 44 foreign languages.

During a writing career that spanned more than half a century, she created two of the world’s most famous detectives. Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. The author of 79 novels and short story collections, she was also an accomplished playwright--one of her 14 plays, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running play in history. She published six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott and wrote four non-fiction books, including an autobiography. Several of her books, including Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, were made into hugely successful films. She died in 1976.