Lestrade Books
It is 1891, and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders when Inspector Sholto Lestrade is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Cline. Lestrade whirls from ballroom and barroom, from vicarage to spiritualist gather, from the studio of the celebrated Alma-Tadema to 221B Baker Street with spell-binding panache.
MINOR TEAR ON BOTTOM EDGE OF SPINE. NO WRITING OR MARKS ON PAGES.
There is a new broom at Scotland Yard: Assistant Commissioner Nimrod Frost. His first ‘little job’ for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall, a savager of sheep and frightener of men; hardly a task for an Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to another suspicious death and then another. All old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection? Is there a serial killer at work? Lestrade clashes with his superiors and finds himself suspended from duty, but that is a mere technicality as he moves from workhouse to royal palace, from backstage of the Lyceum to regimental dinner in his search for clues. When can his glory fade? ‘A romp it is – but Trow also has a serious side, which he shows in the first fifteen pages, giving us a sensitive historical account of the Light Brigade and the men who comprised it. Trow writes of the disastrous event with an empathy which makes this book even more exceptional.’ The Strand Magazine
Lestrade’s detectives at Scotland Yard have promised him that 1910 is going to be a peaceful year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. His daughter, Emma, brings him news of a tragic boating accident and he is soon up to his neck in a series of vicious murders, including that of a man hanged in a church belltower, of a cross-channel swimmer, and his old sparring partner, Dr Watson. Anarchists threaten the peace of Europe and the whole of the Yard is looking for ‘Peter the Painter’. On top of all this, Lestrade is roped in to help with the coronation of George V, and Inspector Walter Dew needs help with the disappearance of a certain Belle Crippen. While Lestrade has his hands full, Mr Frederick Seddon is letting out the top flat of his house to elderly spinsters and new bride Sarah Rose wanders forlornly around the National Gallery, waiting for George Joseph Smith.
Recovering from a broken leg after his ignominious fall from the Titanic, Lestrade should have had a peaceful time convalescing. But an attempt on the life of his future father-in-law makes him realise that a policeman is never really off duty. What is particularly puzzling is the arrival of a letter which simply reads ‘Four for the Gospel Makers’, and it isn’t the first Lestrade has been sent. So begins one of Sholto Lestrade’s most mystifying cases, encompassing both the present and the past. He walks down memory lane to the time when he was a young and very naive constable, looking back on episodes in his career which never came to satisfactory conclusions and hold other clues as to who the sender of the letters is. Because whoever it is, is a cold-blooded killer. ‘A slapstickish bloody finale ensues; leading up to it, we get the customary high profile wisecrackery; with Wodehousian gags rubbing shoulders with double entrendres. Trow’s historical contexts remain impeccable.’ - Oxford Times
The papers call it suicide. The deceased’s father doesn’t. And when Superintendent Lestrade investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, his suspicions of foul play are immediately aroused. One of Britain’s leading athletes, Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the torch of the Olympic Games in London, in that glorious summer of 1908. As the capital plays host to an army of athletes from the Empire, Europe and the United States, international politics rears its ugly head; a respected German journalist is discovered with an ornate paperknife embedded in his back. When a hurdler of the ladies’ team falls victim to her own bust improver, fingers are pointed in all directions, and not the least of Lestrade’s worries is that he is dogged by an investigative journalist, whose husband is a jealous American detective with a short temper and the physique of a brick privy. ‘High spirited rag.’ - The Observer
Knee deep in murder, in his forty-third year. Sholto Lestrade wouldn’t have it any other way. The first victim in a series of bizarre killings is a Captain of the Life Guards, who is found in the Thames at Shadwell Stair, with a war medal wedged between his teeth. Lestrade’s next summons is to the underground caves at Wookey Hole where the demise of an Egyptologist - a scarab clamped between his molars – prompts the question: can a man dead for thousands of years reach beyond the grave and commit murder? The further death of a young subaltern on picquet duty (this time a locket is his dying mouthful) forces Lestrade to go undercover in the Yeomanry and become a barrack-room lawyer of incisive command. As the body count rapidly rises, Lestrade combines a volatile lifestyle with dinner at Blenheim Palace, a near-fatal trip in an air balloon, a disastrous cycle tour, and a masterful mediation in East End gang warfare in the Ratcliffe Highway. ‘It’s an authentic whodunnit with a surprising twist at the end you’ll kick yourself for not guessing sooner.’ Punch
Sholto Lestrade had never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles before Arthur, Duke of Connaught, put him on the trail to the Highlands. Murder is afoot among the footmen of the Royal Household – a servant girl has been brutally slaughtered. Ineptly disguised as a schoolmaster in his bowler and Donegal, the intrepid Superintendent is impelled by a villainous web of conspiracy to the Isle of Skye by way of Balmoral. With the skirl of pipes in his ears, and more than a dram of a certain medicinal compound inside him, Lestrade, following baffling clues, takes the low road alone, save for the mysterious Alistair Sphagnum, in his twin-engined boneshaker. Narrowly escaping the inferno of Room Thirteen in the North British Hotel, Lestrade falls foul of the McNab Of That Ilk and the Mackinnon Of That Ilk and plays a very odd game of ‘Find the Lady’ in Glamis Castle. Coming from Scotland Yard is no help at all to a Sassenach in trews and everyone is convinced it’s a job for the Leith Police. Threatened by ghoulies, ghosties and wee, sleekit beasties, Lestrade hears things go bump in the night before solving the case. ‘A wildly entertaining narrative… that proves emphatically that crime and comedy can mix.’ - Manchester Evening News
England in 1920 is a land fit for heroes. So why is one of those heroes found dead in a dingy London hotel? And why does his war record show that he has been missing, presumed killed in action, for three years? The deceased is the fiancé of Inspector Lestrade’s daughter, and when her tears are dry she sets out to find his murderer. As always with Lestrade, one murder has a habit of leading to another; a second body turns up, linked to the first. How can a woman killed in an air raid in 1917 be found with a bullet through her head three years later? When a succession of foreigners is murdered with the same tell-tale weapon, has World War II started already? Can it be Hunnish practices? Or the Red Peril? Perhaps the Black and Tans? A colourful web of intrigue unfolds as Lestrade and his daughter go undercover in the War Office, the Foreign Office, a film studio and at the Yard itself. When Lestrade’s daughter is kidnapped, the writing is on the wall. And the writing says ‘MI5’. ‘Good enough to make a grown man weep.’ - Yorkshire Post
The London Underground railway in 1895 is described as ‘dark and deadly and halfway to Hell’. Only too true, for as the last train rattles into Liverpool Street, the one remaining passenger does not get off. How could she, when her eyes stare sightless and her heart has stopped? There is another corpse at the Elephant in the morning, wedged between the seats like an old suitcase. And another had missed the late night connection at Stockwell. What is left of her lies on the floor of the ‘padded cell’, her shoes kicked off in the lashings of her agony as she died. There is a maniac at large and Inspector Lestrade is detailed to work with the Railway Police, something he needs a little less than vivisection. Heedless of warnings to ‘Mind The Gap’ and ‘Mind The Doors’ the doughty detective plunges through a tangled web of vicious deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London goes in fear of her life. Who is the legendary ‘Blackfriars Dan’? What are the secrets of the Seven Sisters? Whose body lies at Ealing? Will the London Transport System survive or will Lestrade run out of steam? ‘Characters from fiction mix with those of the real world and have made the Lestrade books best sellers… putting Trow well on the way to becoming one of this country’s top literary humorists.’ Portsmouth News
It was a puzzle that had faced Scotland Yard from its very beginning – whose was the limbless body found among the foundations? And in the murderous world of Sholto Lestrade, one question is invariably followed by another – what do a lecherous rector, a devious speculator and a plagiarist novelist have in common? Answer: they’re all dead, each of them with a bloody space where his skull used to be. And six others are to join them before our intrepid Inspector brings the perpetrator to book. But 1886 was a bad year for the Metropolitan Police. The People of the Abyss have heard the whisper and the spectre of Communism haunts the land. There is a new Commissioner, a regular martinet, at the Yard. And then there is that very odd couple, sometime of Baker Street... Lestrade braves haunted houses, machine gun bullets and two Home Secretaries in his headlong hunt for the truth. And this is the story that chronicles his legendary impersonation of the legendary Sarah Bernhardt. The Police Review was never the same again. ‘It’s an authentic whodunnit with a surprising twist at the end you’ll kick yourself for not guessing sooner.’ Punch
Detective-Sergeant Sholto Lestrade has his work cut out investigating mysterious goings on at Lord George Sanger's Circus.
Superintendent Lestrade and his team at the Yard are facing a series of murders, at first apparently unconnected. An ex-Merchant Navy man and his three nieces are killed when the harness of their trap breaks on a downhill gradient. An accident, surely? But what is the significance of the broken mirror in the Captain’s pocket? Not a stone’s throw from the Yard, a female student of History breaks her neck at King’s College. Misadventure, of course? The broken mirror in her belongings says otherwise. And out on windswept Beachy Head, a member of the Spanish aristocracy is found dead in a ruined lighthouse, with a broken mirror (not usually part of a cavalry officer’s kit) lying beside him. The clues accumulate, but so do the mirrors, and the murders... and the suspects. ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the guiltiest of them all?’ ‘Sergeant Cribb – look to your laurels.’ - Portsmouth News
‘And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh.’ The wings that retired Superintendent Lestrade comes on are those of a de Haviland Hercules. The archaeologist Howard Carter has made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings but all around him, men are dying. Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, falls prey to a mosquito bite. Alain le Clerk leaves the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert. Aaron G String, the railway magnate, blows his brains out yards from the tomb’s entrance. And so it is that Sholto Lestrade flies East to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the Sphinx. People remark on the funny old gizeh, in his bowler and Donegal, battling with the elements against sand, revolting Egyptians and the curse of the Pharaohs. ‘A wildly entertaining narrative that takes in such diverse historical events as riots in Cairo and, most aptly, Bolton Wanderers’ Cup Final appearance at Wembley. M J Trow proves emphatically that crime and comedy can mix.’ - Val McDermid
Lestrade had never been arrested before, although he had often had his collar felt by unsuspecting constables. But now a woman has died in his arms in a London pea-souper and he is not only arrested, but facing the drop. Millicent Millichip, in the wrong place at the right time is neither the first nor last in a series of murders by someone so cunning that all the brains of the Yard can’t catch them – and this despite the calling card left helpfully at every scene. In his time, Lestrade has found it hard enough to follow a case, but from the condemned cell in Pentonville, it is even harder. His friends try their best, breaking and entering, brow-beating and cajoling, to what seems to be no avail. But everyone must try to do what they can – needs must when the Devil drives. ‘A wickedly funny treat.’ - Oxford Times
Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. And it took him back to the good old days, when coppers lived in station houses, that nice Mr Campbell-Bannerman was at Number Ten, and Britain had the biggest empire in the world. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling! Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth. Will any of them live to tell Dew’s tale? The tale of a rat. M J Trow has written this seventeenth in the Lestrade series after a gap of seventeen years, in which the sallow-faced superintendent has never been far from his thoughts. With characters such as Sergeant Bill ‘Wall’ Pepper and Inspector ‘Blabber’ Pearson of the Press Liaison Department sprinkled throughout, this genuine puzzle is also features as ever the wry humour and laugh out loud moments which fans of the accident-prone policeman have come to love. Praise for Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus: ‘A wildly entertaining narrative that takes in such diverse historical events as riots in Cairo and, most aptly, Bolton Wanderers’ Cup Final appearance at Wembley. M J Trow proves emphatically that crime and comedy can mix.’ Val McDermid
Many readers of the Lestrade books wonder what is fact and what is fiction – and the author is delighted that they can’t always tell! So, for all the readers out there who have ever asked that question, here is the World of Inspector Lestrade. In this book, the lid is taken off the Victorian and Edwardian society in a way you’ve never seen before. Lestrade knew everybody, from Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel, to General Baden-Powell, cross-dressing on Brownsea Island, to the hero of Damascus, General Allenby – ‘you can call me Al.’ Have you ever wondered whether Howard Vincent, Director of the brand new CID really had a pet iguana? Find out inside. The Lestrade canon features the great and not so good of Britain when London stood at the heart of the Empire, the biggest in the world on which the sun never set. The novels on which this book is based are genuine whodunnits, with gallows humour and laugh-out-loud moments. Here you will find all the little peccadilloes that Lestrade took for granted. This is history as it really was – and I bet you wish you’d paid more attention at school now!