Richardson's First Case

The D.D.I. recognized him and smiled. “That was a great case you brought us. You’ll be interested to hear that it is a case of mur-r-der!”

For eight years Basil Thomson headed the famous C.I.D., New Scotland Yard. He knew the Yard inside out. Now in this tale of mystery and detection we are taken behind the scenes. We are shown the greatest detection machine in the world in motion, and see how the Yard tracked down its man.

Stand, then, with young P.C. Richardson on the misty corner of Baker Street, while the traffic of the city swings by, and fate lays at his feet the beginning of his career. Out of the fog brakes shriek, a big car jolts to a stop, and from beneath the wheels the crowd disentangles a bundle of old clothes, within which is a man quite dead; a man who had said to someone, “Very well, then; I’ll call a policeman”—and was killed. Work with him to the ingenious solution, when he takes from his pocket the clue holding the fate of a human life.

Richardson’s First Case was originally published in 1933. This new edition, the first in over seventy years, features an introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, author of acclaimed genre history The Golden Age of Murder.

“The story is a good one, with enough mystery in it to keep the reader wondering.” Daily Telegraph

Sir Basil Home Thomson (1861-1939) was educated at Eton and New College Oxford. After spending a year farming in Iowa, he married in 1889 and worked for the Foreign Service. This included a stint working alongside the Prime Minister of Tonga (according to some accounts, he was the Prime Minister of Tonga) in the 1890s followed by a return to the Civil Service and a period as Governor of Dartmoor Prison. He was Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police from 1913 to 1919, after which he moved into Intelligence. He was knighted in 1919 and received other honours from Europe and Japan, but his public career came to an end when he was arrested for committing an act of indecency in Hyde Park in 1925 - an incident much debated and disputed. His eight crime novels featuring series character Inspector Richardson were written in the 1930's and received great praise from Dorothy L. Sayers among others. He also wrote biographical and criminological works.