This classic crime novel by six different authors is introduced by Martin Edwards, archivist of the Detection Club, and includes a never-before-published Preface by Agatha Christie, 'Detective Writers in England', in which she discusses her approach to writing and her fellow writers in the Detection Club. Lord Comstock is a barbarous newspaper tycoon with enemies in high places. His murder in the study of his country house poses a dilemma for the Home Secretary. In the hours before his death, Lord Comstock's visitors included the government Chief Whip, an Archbishop, and the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland Yard. Suspicion falls upon them all and threatens the impartiality of any police investigation. Abandoning protocol, the Home Secretary invites four famous detectives to solve the case: Mrs Adela Bradley, Sir John Saumarez, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Mr Roger Sheringham. All are different, all are plausible, all are on their own - and none of them can ask a policeman... The contributors to ASK A POLICEMAN are: John Rhode, Helen Simpson, Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Milward Kennedy, with Agatha Christie and Martin Edwards.

A unique anthology for crime aficionados - seven of the world's most notorious genuine murder mysteries retold by the most accomplished classic crime writers of their generation. A manipulative murderer who stalked the streets of Paris; a young wife who poisoned her eccentric husband; a bank cashier's mysterious suicide; a brutal double murder in New Zealand... Seven of the world's greatest crime writers turn their hand to some of the world's most spine-tingling mysteries - all of them astonishingly TRUE. This remarkable collection from the archives of the Detection Club follows The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman and Six Against the Yard back into print after more than 75 years, and shows some of the most accomplished authors of their generation retelling real-life murder mysteries with all the relish of the tastiest crime fiction.

A unique anthology for crime aficionados - seven of the world's most notorious genuine murder mysteries retold by the most accomplished classic crime writers of their generation. A manipulative murderer who stalked the streets of Paris; a young wife who poisoned her eccentric husband; a bank cashier's mysterious suicide; a brutal double murder in New Zealand... Seven of the world's greatest crime writers turn their hand to some of the world's most spine-tingling mysteries - all of them astonishingly TRUE. This remarkable collection from the archives of the Detection Club follows The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman and Six Against the Yard back into print after more than 75 years, and shows some of the most accomplished authors of their generation retelling real-life murder mysteries with all the relish of the tastiest crime fiction.

The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric. Featured stories include: 'An Experiment of the Dead', in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell. 'Good Company', in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind. 'Grey Sand and White Sand' is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view. 'The Outcast', in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village. 'The Rite', in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed. Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and studied at Oxford. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1932. She died from cancer in 1940. Her close friend, the novelist Margaret Kennedy, took charge of Simpson's daughter Clemence during the war while Simpson was in her last illness. Clemence and Simpson both feature in Kennedy's wartime memoir, Where Stands A Winged Sentry, also published by Handheld Press. The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women's Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.

A beautiful hardback edition of Angela Carter's feminist retelling of fairy tales - masterful, seductive and luminous. From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. 'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 'A quirky, original, and baroque stylist' Margaret Atwood VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Beautiful editions of great books to last a lifetime INTRODUCED BY HELEN SIMPSON

A dazzling collection of stories from internationally acclaimed writer Helen Simpson, touching on everything from global warming and technology to health and aging to marriage and family life. Whether Simpson's subject is single women or wives, marriage or motherhood, youth, young love, homework or history, "In-Flight Entertainment" is addictive reading that walks a line between being wickedly funny and dark. These thirteen stories brilliantly share the small details of interaction that reveal larger secrets and inner conflicts of contemporary living. They unerringly capture a type, a social class, a pattern of behavior, a generation.

This classic crime novel by six different authors is introduced by Martin Edwards, archivist of the Detection Club, and includes a never-before-published Preface by Agatha Christie, 'Detective Writers in England', in which she discusses her approach to writing and her fellow writers in the Detection Club. Lord Comstock is a barbarous newspaper tycoon with enemies in high places. His murder in the study of his country house poses a dilemma for the Home Secretary. In the hours before his death, Lord Comstock's visitors included the government Chief Whip, an Archbishop, and the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland Yard. Suspicion falls upon them all and threatens the impartiality of any police investigation. Abandoning protocol, the Home Secretary invites four famous detectives to solve the case: Mrs Adela Bradley, Sir John Saumarez, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Mr Roger Sheringham. All are different, all are plausible, all are on their own - and none of them can ask a policeman... The contributors to ASK A POLICEMAN are: John Rhode, Helen Simpson, Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Milward Kennedy, with Agatha Christie and Martin Edwards.

Brilliantly funny, terrifying, tender and sharp: the best short stories to come out of lockdown. A vibrant collection of established and emerging authors, including A L Kennedy, Helen Simpson, Alison Moore whose novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Amanda Huggins (winner of the Colm Toibin short story award), Richard Lambert shortlisted for The Sunday Times EFG award, Stephen S. Thomson author of Toy Soldiers and Sitting in Limbo for BBC 1 . Introduction by Amanda Craig, long listed for the Women's prize for Fiction 2021. '18 well-chosen stories, loosely based on the idea of solitude, explore loss, loneliness and love, and head from the wilds of the Northern Rockies with an ailing father and an intrepid grieving daughter (Leadfall by D. W. Wilson) to the cable-tangled, neon-jagged streets of Bangkok where, in Stephen Thomas's titular story, a traveller watches the world and thinks the setting is strange to her, but her thoughts are inescapably familiar.'DAILY MAIL

London today is embattled as rarely before. In a city of enormous wealth, poverty is rampant. The burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower stands as an appalling reminder that inequality can be so acute as to be murderous. Here, Claire Armitstead has drawn together fiction, reportage and poetry to capture the schisms defining the contemporary city. With nearly 40% of the capital's population born outside the country, Tales of Two Londons eschews what Armitstead labels a "tyranny of tone," emphasising voices rarely heard. Featuring writers such as Ali Smith, Jon Snow, Arifa Akbar and Ruth Padel alongside stories from previously unpublished immigrants and refugees, this is a compelling collection which captures the fabric of the city: its housing, its food, its pubs, its buses, even its graveyards.

Cockfosters is a funny, frank and forceful story collection dealing with ageing, ambition and the patterns of repetition and renewal found in long friendships and marriages. It opens irresistible new windows onto the world from Arizona to Dubai and from Moscow to Berlin. Turning both a panoramic and a zoom lens on the way we live now, these stories range through hitch-hiking in Bohemian forest-land to cresting the waves of the Aegean to the mending of hearts and the recovery of lost property at the end of the Piccadilly Line. Helen Simpson writes with great warmth, wit and candour about the complexities of modern life, and this new collection shows why she is hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today.

Enjoy Helen Simpson's sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood in this perfect Mother's Day gift. Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly for another hour in the day. Perhaps you know this land well, or perhaps you're entering it for the first time - either way, you need these honest funny humane stories from an expert guide. Selected from Helen Simpson's short story collections Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Constitutional VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Language by Xiaolu Guo Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard Eating by Nigella Lawson Drinking by John Cheever

Taking tea is one of the quintessentially English occasions, and who is a greater authority on the subject than the sumptuous Ritz London Hotel? This charming Edwardian-style book captures the essence of this traditional British pastime, and provides us with all the expertise on the ceremony as well as the recipes. Stories about the legendary afternoon teas at The Ritz and fascinating details about the history of tea drinking are complemented with passages from such diverse writers as Charles Dickens to Oscar Wilde. Over fifty recipes are included for different kinds of afternoon tea specialities, from delicate sandwiches, strawberry shortcake and rose petal jam, to crumpets and muffins for hearty teas in front of a roaring fire. The author gives an infallible guide to the many blends of tea and their suitability to particular occasions. Beautifully presented and delightfully illustrated, this book is the perfect gift for tea drinkers everywhere.

A stunning new collection of short stories about motherhood, selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite. ______________ 'To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colours of a rainbow' MAYA ANGELOU The story of motherhood is an endlessly rich one: it's one of love - and all the highs and lows that come with that world-turning emotion - and, in the purest sense, of life itself. Within these pages, some of the finest writers in the world explore motherhood in wildly varying modes, from single parenthood to sisters coparenting, from the deepest hardships to the biggest celebrations. Selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite, author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother. Stories by Lydia Davis, Anita Desai, Mary Gaitskill, Tessa Hadley, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Irenosen Okojie, Casey Plett, Tabitha Siklos, Helen Simpson, Ali Smith

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ("Masterly" --Adam Mars Jones, "The Observer"; "A virtuoso performance" --Jane Shilling, "The Sunday Telegraph") about single women and wives in various phases of midlife--anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers--in a (futile) search for security and consolation.
Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance--a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in--becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible--producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled "Constitutional"--a pun on one of the word's meanings: a walk taken for the benefit of one's health--deals with memory, family, Alzheimer's, oak trees, pregnancy for the over-forties, stolen photographs, and crossword puzzles.
Helen Simpson's stories move and disturb us as they light up the human gift for making the best of it--"whatever" it is.

Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. In Simpson's singular and opulent voice, we hear of the mixed blessings of independence and marriage, of sex and babies. From a bed that transforms the lives of a struggling couple to a chorus of midwives telling the dramatic story of a birth, this is a playful, unique set of stories to treasure.

With this rich range of unabridged stories we celebrate the very best of contemporary writers and writing. Among others the collections features thriller writer Ruth Rendell, witty William Boyd, the Japanese literary sensation Haruki Murakami, ever-inventive Helen Simpson, and Patrick O'Brien, world-famous for his nautical series. Readers include top British actors Martin Jarvis, Rosalind Ayres and Janet McTeer.

Hilarious, dark, and thoroughly entertaining, Getting a Life proves Helen Simpson to be one of the finest observers of women on the edge. Set in and around contemporary London, these nine stories explore both the blisses and irritations of domestic life.
An ambitious teenager vows never to settle for any of the adult lives she sees around her. Two old friends get tipsy at a small cafe and end up revealing more than they intended. In a boutique so exclusive that entrance requires a password, a frazzled careerwoman explores the anesthetizing effect of highly impractical clothing. And in the mesmerizing title story, a mother of three takes life one day at a time, while pushing the ominous question of whether she wants to firmly to one side.