Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in Traditional Detectives

'Some are born to sweet delight/Some are born to endless night' - William Blake. Agatha Christie wrote Endless Night in 1967, and it is one of her greatest - and most unusual - novels. Creepy, malevolent and claustrophobic, it is a story about choices, the nature of good and evil, and grim...

A BBC Radio full-cast dramatisation from the Queen of Crime. Father Gorman is called to a dingy rooming house to see a woman who, before she dies, confesses a bizarre tale to him. Leaving the house he is followed but, in the fog, a fatal blow is struck. Nine names on a piece of paper found in...

Here are six extraordinary adventures, never revealed before, starring Simon Callow as Sherlock Holmes and Nicky Henson as Dr Watson, written by John Taylor...

When a body is found in the village pond, Convent Mother Helen and DI Cromwell are brought together to solve the crime and figure out what actually happened to Father Jack. The duo embark on an unlikely friendship as they bring their heads together to solve the murder. It’s not long before the two super sleuths are at it again when a precious icon goes missing from the church.

Linnet Ridgeway has led a charmed life. Blessed with beauty, enormous wealth and a devoted husband, she has everything anyone could wish for. But as the happy couple set out on an idyllic honeymoon cruise on the Nile, storm clouds are gathering... Linnet's former friend, Jacqueline de...

The brilliant creation of British author A.E.W. Mason, Inspector Hanaud has been hailed as ‘the first major fiction police detective of the Twentieth Century’, and was one of the inspirations for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. In these engaging whodunits, France’s cleverest investigator is tasked with proving the innocence of two young women, both accused of murder.

When Poirot arrives in France, following an urgent appeal for help, he finds he is too late. His client, a South American millionaire, has been stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining the property. Meanwhile the millionaire's wife is found...

With the House of Commons in recess, it's a chance for all hard-working politicians to take a holiday. So when Conservative MP Vincent Mellors and Labour MP Arnold Sellers discover that they're staying at the same golf hotel in Lytham St Annes, they agree to put affairs of state on the back burner. But they're soon handed a political hot potato in the shape of Sir Bertram Oliphant's parliamentary memoirs. Full of red-hot revelations, the manuscript is diplomatic dynamite - and someone will go to any lengths to get their hands on it.

From 1938 to 1969 crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of BBC radio’s most popular serials. They inhabited a sophisticated world of chilled cocktails and fast cars, where the women were chic and the men...

Where has George Cameron disappeared to? What deadly formula has he discovered? Why is his daughter Lucy in such terrible danger? And why was the meek chemist Tibbs so ruthlessly killed? The fate of the country lies in the hands of one man... Dick Barton – Special Agent! Captain Richard Barton...

Full-cast radio adaptations of two classic mysteries by the writer of The Phantom of the Opera Gaston Leroux was one of the pioneers of the detective story, alongside Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe. Best known for The Phantom of the Opera, he also wrote a series of crime novels featuring...

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 struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he...

A collection of RD Wingfield’s finest thrillers from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties Best known for his ‘Inspector Jack Frost’ series of novels, RD Wingfield also penned a string of gripping thrillers for BBC Radio. Initially thought lost, many of the 14 dramas in this collection were...

Two recently-rediscovered Hercule Poirot short stories byAgatha Christie, read by David Suchet.In 2004, a remarkable archive was unearthed at Agatha Christie’s family home, Greenway – 73 of her private notebooks, filled with pencilled jottings and ideas. Hidden within this literary treasure...

Lester Powell's Chandleresque detective Philip Odell was a huge hit on the BBC Light Programme between 1947 and 1961, thrilling audiences with his crime-solving adventures in post-war London. This gripping collection brings together the only two surviving radio serials featuring the tough-guy investigator—one of which, Test Room Eight, is published here for the very first time.

A thrilling saga of criminal masterminds, espionage and adventure, Edward J. Mason's Dick Barton: Special Agent was a huge hit on the BBC Light Programme between 1946 and 1951. Together with his mates Jock Anderson and Snowy White, ex-Commando Dick faced dastardly villains and deadly peril—but always triumphed ('With one bound, Dick was free!') Half a century later, Edward J's son Lol paid affectionate tribute to the much-loved radio hero with this sparkling pastiche, featuring the joint escapades of father-and-son duo Dick and Richard Barton.

Thorndyke is arguably the first true forensic detective, for while we remember Sherlock Holmes for his genius in unearthing significant detail, only Thorndyke's methods pass the test of real-world authenticity. It might be maintained that while Holmes perhaps did it with style, Thorndyke does it with science.

Julian Rhind-Tutt reads Sapper's thrilling adventures of private detective Captain Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond, as heard on BBC Radio. In these six episodes, the demobbed officer offers his services to any client offering adventure. This leads him into danger and dashing escapades, as he finds...