From the makers of Sunday Classics
Twenty original mysteries you can solve yourself, across five classic formats — every one set in the golden age of the great screen detectives. No gore. No gimmicks. Nothing but your own two eyes.
The rules of the game
Every clue you need is on the page, in plain sight, before the solution — and you'll never need outside knowledge. Any fact of the period a case turns on is planted in the story itself. If you're beaten, you're beaten honestly.
Each case ends with a challenge: name the killer, find the lie, or spot the one fatal mistake. Stuck? Two graduated hints wait beneath every challenge — printed upside down, so nothing is spoiled by a wandering eye.
Every solution walks the full chain of reasoning like the final scene of an episode — never a bare answer key. Near-misses get their due too: you'll know exactly why suspicion isn't proof.
What's inside · Twenty cases · Five formats · 1920–1975
Manor houses, television studios, trunk calls and telegram boys. Every case set between 1920 and 1975 — no mobile phones, no DNA, no laboratories. Pure deduction, the way the classics did it.
A visitor in a doorway. A room where somebody died. A car parked forty feet from a cliff edge. Everything you need is in the scene — the pale band on a forehead, the cup poured but never touched. What would the greatest of detectives see in it? Now it's your consulting room.
A country house, a bridge table, a snowbound hall — a small cast of suspects, every one of them with a motive, and every clue laid before you under the strict old rules. Order your suspects, exercise the little cells, and name the killer before the inspector does.
You watch the crime committed on page one. You know the killer. The puzzle is spotting the single mistake that will undo them — a slip three words long, made smiling. Almost no puzzle book offers these. This one is built on them.
The established facts of a case — then a suspect's statement. Exactly one numbered sentence is provably false, and it is always doing a job. Find the job, and you find the lie. They start friendly, and get devious.
A hotel register. A telegram from a missing man. A bridge score-sheet kept in a governess's hand. The evidence is reproduced on the page for your inspection — read the documents against each other and catch what the person who wrote them hoped you wouldn't. Documents lie less often than people; but people write the documents.
THREE DIFFICULTY TIERS Start with Open-and-Shut Cases, work up through Tough Cases, and finish — if you dare — with The Unsolvables.
COMFORTABLE LARGE TYPE Designed to be read in an armchair, not squinted at.
SOLVE ONE TONIGHT Pour a cup of tea; your first case takes about twenty minutes. Feature cases run a full forty-five.
Not a quiz. An examination.
The book is framed as your apprenticeship under the Examiner — a retired examiner of detectives with forty years of candidates behind him and no patience for guessing. His letter opens the book. His verdicts close every case.
Look inside
Read the opening of an inverted mystery — the format where you watch the crime, and the game is catching the mistake.
KENT · SATURDAY EVENING · OCTOBER 1954
Dr. Henry Latimer arrived at Larkspur Cottage a little after seven on Saturday evening, and by twenty minutes to eight his cousin Rupert was dead at the foot of the cellar stairs.
It had not been difficult. Rupert Vane was a large, careless man, already two whiskies deep when Henry arrived, and quite happy to lead the way down for another bottle — still talking, as he always talked, about the five hundred pounds Henry was going to pay him. About what the Medical Council would say if they learned how the late Mrs. Ashby had really come by her prescriptions.
One firm push at the top of the steep wooden stairs settled the matter.
Henry worked quickly and without emotion, as he did in surgery. He arranged the body, splashed whisky across Rupert's shirt front, set the empty bottle rolling on the flagstones — and drove back to London through the dark, rehearsing his masterstroke. At five to ten, in front of his housekeeper, he lifted the telephone…
The doctor's alibi is perfect — except for one detail he never noticed. Catching it is Case No. 001. Nineteen more wait behind it.
What arrives when you order
Who's behind this
Sunday Classics is watched by classic detective fans who know their Suchet from their Ustinov and their Brett from their Rathbone. These cases were written for that audience: viewers who don't just love mysteries, but love them fairly played.
Not a trivia quiz. A fair fight. Every case is test-solved before publication. If a puzzle isn't solvable from the clues on the page, it doesn't make the book.
Every clue you need is on the page. That's the promise. If the book isn't what you hoped, reply to your receipt email within 30 days and you'll get a full refund. No forms, no fuss, no questions.
Questions
No. The channel is about the great detectives; the book makes you one. Every case is an original mystery written for the book — nothing is recycled from the videos, and nothing in the videos spoils a single case.
The opening of Case No. 001 is on this page, just above — and every case is covered by the Fair-Play Guarantee: if the book isn't what you hoped, you get a full refund within 30 days. You're never buying blind.
Within a minute of ordering, you'll receive an email with your download link. The book is a PDF you can read on any computer or tablet, or print at home. If the email doesn't arrive, write to us and a human will sort it out the same day.
No. These are classic-style mysteries in the golden-age tradition — clever, not gruesome. Nothing you couldn't read aloud to the family.
Twenty cases across 129 pages. The quick cases take ten or fifteen minutes; the feature-length mysteries are a thirty-to-forty-five-minute sit-down apiece. Solved one an evening, it's three weeks of murders — and the hard ones bear re-reading, because the clue was always there.
The book is arranged from easiest to hardest, and every case carries two graduated hints. Most readers solve the early cases and get properly stuck somewhere in the middle — which is exactly as it should be.
No. Everything is in the book, including full solutions at the back.
It's made for it. Order as normal and forward the download email, or print a case and tuck it in a card — the book's twenty cases have entertained more than one Sunday family gathering already.
Card or PayPal. Checkout takes under a minute and you don't need to create an account.
Twenty cases. Five formats. One promise:
everything you need is on the page.
30-day fair-play guarantee · Instant delivery · Card or PayPal