Leo Bruce
Leo Bruce is a pseudonym for Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979). Under this name, Bruce wrote several mystery novels. He created two series, one featuring Sergeant Beef, a British police officer, and a second in which Carolus Deene, senior history master at the fictional Queen's School, Newminster, is an amateur detective.
Most Leo Bruce books are now out of print. Croft-Cooke also wrote a large number of books, plays, short stories, and other work under his own name.
Sergeant Beef series
- Case for Three Detectives (1936) ISBN 0-89733-033-1
An example of the locked room type of murder mystery, this book spoofs three famous fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey, as Sir Simon Plimsoll, Hercule Poirot as Monsieur Amer Picon, and Father Brown, under the name of Monsignor Smith.
The remaining books in the series are out of print.
- Case Without a Corpse (1937)
- Case With Four Clowns (1939)
- Case With No Conclusion (1939)
- Case With Ropes and Rings (1940)
- Case For Sergeant Beef (1947)
- Neck and Neck (1951)
- Cold Blood (1952)
Carolus Deene series
- At Death’s Door (1955)
- Dead for a Ducat (1956)
- Death of a Cold (1956)
- Dead Man’s Shoes (1958)
- A Louse for the Hangman (1958)
- Our Jubilee Is Death (1959)
- Furious Old Women (1960)
- Jack on the Gallows Tree (1960)
- Die All, Die Merrily (1961)
- A Bone and a Hank of Hair (1961)
- Nothing Like Blood (1962)
- Such Is Death (1963)
- Death in Albert Park (1964)
- Death at Hallows End (1965) (reprinted in paperback by Academy Chicago Publishers, May 2008)
- Death on the Black Sands (1966)
- Death of a Commuter (1967)
- Death at St. Asprey’s School (1967)
- Death on Romney Marsh (1968)
- Death with Blue Ribbon (1969)
- Death on Allhallowe’en (1970)
- Death by the Lake (1971)
- Death in the Middle Watch (1974)
- Death of a Bovver Boy (1974)
References
- Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction, T. J. Binyon (Oxford, 1989) ISBN 0-19-219223-X pp. 54,123
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