Sax Rohmer was the pseudonym of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (15 Feb 1883-1 June 1959) later adopted the name Sax Rohmer in real life; born in Birmingham, Warwickshire; underworld journalist; song and sketch writer. Moris Klaw, eccentric antique dealer and psychic, tackles an intriguing mystery in this unusual and memorable story set in a museum

An aging man who still lives with his mother harbors a bizarre secret fetish which he fears will ostracize him from his mother and perhaps leave him without a home if he were discovered. However, he may find that his mother's response to his foible is entirely unexpected, and when the two finally open up to each other, the resulting events are trul...

Feisty Chicago private eye Vic 'V. I.' Warshawski is used to getting mixed up in complicated cases. But when three million dollars in share certificates are stolen from a Dominican priory, she really doesn't want to get involved. Because agreeing to investigate would mean doing a favour for Aunt Rosa, the priory's treasurer, and Vic has never forgi...

No Orchids for Miss Blandish was crime author James Hadley Chase's first novel, and an experiment in adapting American hard-boiled crime fiction by a British author. Inspired by James Cain and The Postman Always Rings Twice, it worked so well that it launched the former salesman's writing career. He went on to write over eighty novels sold worldwid...

Philip Marlowe is the centre of a succession of curious and increasingly violent happenings when he agrees to take on a case for Little Sister. He is swept into a series of collisions with movie stars, gangsters, small town girls and the police.

Snipers in the hills overlook half the intersections in Sarajevo. In the streets below, people strive to go about their daily lives, trying to second guess when and where the next bullet will strike. One man, a cellist, defies this game of 'Sarajevo Roulette'. In memory of the city's dead, for two consecutive days, he becomes a sitting target as he...

DI Kate Simms is on the fast track to nowhere. Five years ago she helped a colleague when she shouldn't have. She's been clawing her way back from a demotion ever since. Professor Nick Fennimore is a failed genetics student, successful gambler, betting agent, crime scene officer, chemistry graduate, toxicology specialist and one-time scientific adv...

A dying policeman recalls how a gruesome murder many years back was to change his life forever. When John Zebedee is found killed with a knife in the night, our narrator is sent to investigate. He soon finds that Mrs Crosscapel's lodging-house is a place of dark secrets and buried passions - emotions that will soon cloud even his own judgement.

In Kate Wilhelm's latest crime novel, a small Oregon town is rocked by a wheels-within-wheels case of art, fraud, and murder. Silver Bay, Oregon, a small coastal resort town of under a thousand residents, is home to three generations of women: Marnie, the long-widowed owner of a small gift shop; Van, her granddaughter who is about to graduate fr...

His name is carefully guarded from the general public but within the secretive inner circles of the ultra-rich Dr Alex Hoffmann is a legend - a visionary scientist whose computer software turns everything it touches into gold. Together with his partner, an investment banker, Hoffmann has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence tha...

The place is St Oswald's, an old and long-established boys' grammar school in the north of England. A new year has just begun, and for the staff and boys of the school, a wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits, paperwork and Information Technology rule the world and Roy Straitley, Latin master, eccentric, and veteran of St Oswald's, is finally...

Tom Sedley's idyllic summer vacation in a leafy post war suburb of north London came to an abrupt and shocking end on the 14th September, 1948 when his sister was brutally murdered in woodland near his house. A tramp was arrested for the crime but for the young boy it was the end of childhood and the beginning of a lifelong search to discover what...

Ingrid Olsson returns home from a Stockholm hospital to discover a man in her kitchen. She's never seen the intruder before. But he's no threat - he's dead. Criminal Investigator Conny Sjoberg takes the call, abandoning his wife Asa and their five children for the night. His team identify the body as that of a middle-aged family man. But why was he...

When historian Fluke Kelso learns of the existence of a secret notebook belonging to Josef Stalin he is determined to track it down, whatever the consequences. From the violent political intrigue and decadence of modern Moscow he heads north - to the vast forests surrounding the White Sea port of Archangel, and a terrifying encounter with Russia's...

Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. 'Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary.' Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journ...

What is it about men anyway? Bad cars, bad jobs, even bad teeth-nothing convinces them that they can't snare a size-two babe with a D-cup chest. And after way too many Internet dates with men named "luvstick" and "bigdaddy182," Lucy Rothschild should know. But sitting across from her now is "hardluvnman," and he seems different-sensitive, honest, a...

Toby Stephens stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe mystery. Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the '40s and '50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must strug...

Introducing Luke Carlton - ex-Special Boat Service commando, and now under contract to MI6 for some of its most dangerous missions. Sent into the steaming Colombian jungle to investigate the murder of a British intelligence officer, Luke finds himself caught up in the coils of a plot that has terrifying international dimensions. Hunted down, cap...

When Professor Robert Langdon's mentor is brutally kidnapped, he realises the only hope of saving his friend is to follow the clues hidden in an ancient invitation. He is then plunged into a deadly race against time as he battles through a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, codes and hidden truths, all leading towards a shocking and unthinkable...

When the National Security Agency's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage...not by guns or bombs but by a code so co...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Poison Bed by E C Fremantle, read by Ross Anderson and Perdita Weeks. A Marriage. A Murder. One of them did it. Which of them will die for it? In the autumn of 1615 scandal rocks the Jacobean court when a celebrated couple are imprisoned on suspicion of murder. She is young, captivating and from a notor...