The discovery of a body turns a cross-country train journey into a hunt for a killer in this classic Golden Age locked-room mystery. The luxurious Transcontinental Express, a locomotive journeying coast-to-coast across the United States, is the height of 1930s technology and sophistication. Alongside carriages for dining, drinking and dancing, there''s even a swimming pool car - which is precisely where the corpse of a banker is found floating facedown just one day into the journey. With nowhere to hide, any passenger could be next, and anyone could be the killer. With time running out, it''s up to the clever Dr Pons - with his sharp wit and knack for impossible puzzles - to get to the bottom of the case, before it is too late. ''A highly ingenious, entertaining and unusual tale.'' Daily Herald

Autorentext

C. Daly King (Author)
C. Daly King (1895-1963) was an American psychologist and detective story writer. He was born in New York City and educated at Yale University. After fighting in World War I, he worked in textiles and in advertising before returning to school to study psychology, with a particular focus on sleep and consciousness. In the 1930s, King published nine books that quickly established him as a master of the Golden Age mystery, but ceased writing fiction with the advent of World War II.

Otto Penzler (Introducer)
Otto Penzler owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and founded the Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books. He has written and edited several books, including the Edgar Award-winning Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, and is the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories of the Year.

Klappentext

First published in 1937, a Golden Age classic murder mystery set on a cross-country train.

'A highly ingenious, entertaining and unusual tale' - Daily Herald

The luxurious Transcontinental Express, a locomotive journeying coast-to-coast across the United States, is the height of 1930s technology and sophistication. Alongside carriages for dining, drinking and dancing, there's even a swimming pool car. And it's there, just one day into the journey, that the corpse of a banker is found.

With a killer on the train, the passengers soon begin to turn on one another. It's up to the clever Dr Pons - with his sharp wit and knack for impossible puzzles - to get to the bottom of the case, even as every new piece of evidence seems to suggest more perplexing possibilities.

'Ingenious . . . A satisfyingly complex solution to both crimes' - Booklist

'Extravagantly brainy, gloriously dated' - Kirkus