Christopher Bush: 42 books

“At first it may seem an astounding coincidence that two members of a family should have considered it necessary to ask for the services of the same detective agency. I think I can prove otherwise, and even if I can’t, the facts remain. Alice Stonhill and Peter Wesslake did precisely what I have...

The curtain had been drawn back and there was the bed. Wharton and a stranger were standing by it, and when Wharton moved to meet me, I saw on the bed the body of Penelope Craye. “She’s dead,” I said. Wharton merely nodded. Once again, we meet our old friend Ludovic Travers—now...

Near the right temple was a hole, and down the forehead and along the nose was dried blood. “Shot, by God! No wonder the poor old devil couldn’t hear.” When the telephone bell rings in Bill Ellice’s Broad Street Detective Agency, it happens to be Ludovic Travers who takes the...

“And that’s not all. Somers is dead too … He poisoned himself … in the lounge!” The great English boxer Michael France looks set to become the new Heavyweight Champion of the world. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the forthcoming and decisive match. Ex-CID officer John Franklin...

It was Murder Eve, and I was the last person in Sandbeach to suspect it. Ludovic Travers certainly isn’t anticipating anything remotely resembling murder, least of all his own. But when he is invited to a strange hotel, someone does turns up murdered, and in a most peculiar way. Travers,...

The tea had brought a pleasant warmth and Travers snuggled down in bed. Once more he was busy with something that had vastly cheered him of late—a perfect scheme for the murder of Stirrop. There were difficulties from the first day the blustering and objectionable Major Stirrop set foot in...

“I have an idea that a certain man is going to commit murder. He told me so—in so many words.” If Ludovic Travers hadn’t been so sure the man was serious, he might not have gone snooping. If he hadn’t kept his eyes peeled, he might have noticed what happened to the housekeeper’s...

I was thinking of offering Godfrey Prial some sort of partnership. I’m pretty sure now of at least two things—that he liked me, and that he’d have accepted. If he’d lived. When Ludovic Travers took over Bill Ellice’s Broad Street Detective Agency, he was glad to welcome back from...

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Christopher Bush traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic...

“Send someone here quick. There’s been a murder!” Mr Lewton is dead. Stabbed through the back, no possibility of suicide—and no sign of a knife either. The deceased made a phone call summoning a doctor immediately before his own death. And the servant who supposedly reported the murder...

Palmer saw him out, and gave that little deprecatory cough. “If you’ll pardon me, sir, is it another murder?” “Looks like it,” Travers told him from the door. This affair of Ludovic Travers and George “the General” Wharton is packed full with sleuthing excitement,...

“Let us know when you’re dead!” Ludovic Travers had known it was a publicity stunt, all that business about the anonymous threatening letters. He expected a hoax but what he found was two men lying dead on the floor of Crewe’s bedroom. To be confronted with murder at eight in the morning...

“Famous Spiritualist Dead . . . Gun Found in Flat” In The Case of the Happy Medium Ludovic Travers is at the top of his considerable form. When Ludovic and his wife set out to attend a séance, they are in a mood of amiable scepticism. But the atmosphere swiftly changes when Travers is...

The murderer was clever and the planning was perfect. There was apparently nothing that had been overlooked and nothing that didn’t go to plan. There was nothing that could be called a slip. Why then was the murderer caught? Too few answers chasing too many questions is the problem facing...