About this item
Margery Allingham's Mr Campion finds himself a fish out of water when he investigates a murder in a Yorkshire mining village. Following the death of the senior English master in a tragic road accident, Mr Campion's son Rupert and daughter-in-law Perdita are helping out at Ash Grange School for Boys, where Perdita's godfather is headmaster. While Perdita is directing the end-of-term play, a musical version of Dr Faustus, Rupert is tackling the school's rugby football team - and both of them are finding their allotted tasks more of a challenge than they had anticipated. When the headmaster telephones Albert Campion to inform him that Rupert has been arrested, Mr Campion heads to Yorkshire to get to the bottom of the matter. There are no secrets in the traditional mining village of Denby Ash, he's told - but on uncovering reports of a disruptive poltergeist, a firebrand trade unionist, a missing conman and a local witch, he finds that's far from being the case. And was the English master, Mr Browne's, death really an accident . . .?
About the Author
Mike Ripley is the author of 21 novels including the award-winning 'Angel' series of comedy thrillers and one of the few authors to win the Crime Writers' Last Laugh Award twice. From 1989 to 2008 he was crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and then the Birmingham Post, reviewing over 950 crime novels and co-edited three volumes of 'Fresh Blood' stories by new British writers, including Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Ken Bruen, Charlie Higson and Christopher Brookmyre. He was also a scriptwriter on the BBC's series "Lovejoy".Professionally, he read history at university, trained as a journalist and went into public relations, working for the Brewers Society in London, promoting British beer and pubs, for 21 years. As part of his obligatory mid-life crisis, he gave up life in the big city and retrained as an archaeologist, working mostly on Romano-British sites in East Anglia.At the age of 50 he had a stroke. He survived, recovered, wrote a book about it and served on the government's Stroke Strategy Committee which reported in 2009.He has produced festival performances with crime writers Colin Dexter and Minette Walters, as well as devising a Creative Crime Writing course for Cambridge Universityand the comedy panel game "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Cluedo" which was performed as the finale to the 2016 Crimefest convention in Bristol. Currently he writes the monthly "Getting Away With Murder" column on www.shotsmag.co.uk and for The Guardian newspaper. He is the series editor of the Ostara Crime and Top Notch Thrillers imprints, rescuing and reviving crime novels and thrillers which do not deserve to be forgotten.He completed the third Albert Campion novel left unfinished on the death of Pip Youngman Carter (husband of Margery Allingham) in 1969. "Mr Campion's Farewell" was published in the UK and the US in 2014 and has continued the Campion series with "Mr Campion's Fox" (2015) and "Mr Campion's Fault" in 2016. He has also edited "Tales on the Off-Beat" - a collection of short stories by Youngman Carter and two volumes of "Callan Uncovered" by James Mitchell, creator of the legendary television series starring Edward Woodward.
