In the comfortable English Dorsetshire village of Anneypenny in the 1930s, fruit farmer Douglas Sewell – narrator of the story – sees his friend John die in agony. The death certificate states gastric ulcers but the post mortem’s revealing of poison punctures Anneypenny’s idyllic backdrop. Soon every friend and neighbour seems to harbour something suspicious. Douglas challenges his readers, or listeners, to answer the key questions before throwing out several scenarios and turning them upside-down in a tantalising path to the truth.
A journalist as well as a novelist, Anthony Berkeley was a founding member of the Detection Club and one of crime fiction’s greatest innovators. He was one of the first to predict the development of the ‘psychological’ crime novel.