The Pleasure Cruise Mystery

"What's the matter?" Vereker asked breathlessly, and at the same moment realised that the mass lying at Ricardo's feet was the body of a woman. "Has she fainted?"

"It's Mrs. Mesado, Algernon," replied Ricardo, "and if I'm not mistaken, she's dead."

Algernon Vereker's best friend Manuel Ricardo is looking forward to a cruise on the luxury liner Mars, and persuades an overwrought Vereker to join him. Once on board, Ricky's mind is on romance while the amiable and eccentric Vereker is keener to relax with a cigar and a good book - until murder at sea means an abrupt detour into spine-chilling mystery. Vereker starts to investigate Mrs Mesado's demise, which presents many baffling features - beneath borrowed gloves, the lady's hands were cut and bruised; and where was the diamond necklace she had been wearing earlier that evening? These and other conundrums must be solved before Vereker can bring the culprit (or culprits) to justice, but as Ricky sagely observes: "half the fun of eating a nut is cracking the shell".

The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933), a light-hearted but lethal maritime whodunit, is the third Algernon Vereker detective novel. It is republished here for the first time in over 70 years, and includes a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

'Before all is cleared up the reader has raced excitedly through a thoroughly sound and quite unusual yarn.' Aberdeen Press

Auteur

Robin Forsythe was born Robert Forsythe in 1879. His place of birth was Sialkot, in modern day Pakistan. His mother died when a younger brother was born two years later, and 'Robin' was brought up by an ayah until he was eight. He was sent home to Glasgow for education supervised by an unmarried solicitor uncle. He went to school in Glasgow and Northern Ireland. In his teens he had short stories and poetry published and went to London wanting to be a writer. He married and had a son in 1910, later working in the accounts department of Somerset House in London when he was arrested for theft and fraud in 1928. Sentenced to fifteen months, he began to write his first detective novel in prison. On his release in 1929 Robin Forsythe published his debut, Missing or Murdered. It introduced Anthony 'Algernon' Vereker, an eccentric artist with an extraordinary flair for detective work. It was followed by four more detective novels in the Vereker series, ending with The Spirit Murder Mystery in 1936. All the novels are characterized by the sharp plotting and witty dialogue which epitomize the more effervescent side of golden age crime fiction. Robin Forsythe died in 1937.