A Hobby of Murder

The irresistible Andrew Basnett series may have been written in the 1980s and '90s, but its soul lies with the classic crime fiction of the 1930s.

Here, for example, is A Hobby of Murder, with its setting at--wait for it--a classic country-house party, that staple of the Golden Age. Rounding out the guest list are, among others, a mystery writer, a lawyer with a reason to dislike him, a doctor, a retired teacher with a passion for photography, and the lord of the local manor, keen amateur chef Sam Waldron--so keen that he has recreated an 18th-century dinner. His skills may not match his ambition, but he didn't mean to poison the coffee. Oh no? The local police inspector isn't so sure, but in the finest Golden Age tradition he's rather an idiot. When the bodies start piling up, it's a good thing that Basnett is on hand to sort things out!

About the Author
E.X. Ferrars (Morna Doris MacTaggart) was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name, her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book Toby Dyke series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America's turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers' Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 mysteries, finally returning to series--first with the Virginia and Felix Freer books and then with Andrew Basnett--in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.