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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF First published in Great Britain by Collins Crime Club 2016 Copyright © The Detection Club 2016 Cover design by Bold&Noble.com © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008100438 Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008100445 Version: 2016-04-27
To the memory of P.D. James,
a loyal member of The Detection Club,
who had promised to
write an introduction to this book –
but was sadly prevented from doing so
Table of Contents
The Floating Admiral ‘by Certain Members of the Detection Club’ was published in 1931, fairly early into the association’s existence. The ‘Certain Members’ who produced that original collaborative novel were, in alphabetical order: Anthony Berkeley, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, G. D. H. and M. Cole, Freeman Wills Crofts, Clemence Dane, Edgar Jepson, Milward Kennedy, Ronald A. Knox, John Rhode, Dorothy L. Sayers, Henry Wade and Canon Victor L. Whitechurch. Since that time the novel has appeared in many foreign editions and been republished twice, by Macmillan in 1981 and by HarperCollins in 2011. The royalties deriving from the book have done much to defray the expenses of the events for which the Detection Club exists, three congenial dinners a year. Since I took over the Presidency in 2001 I have nurtured the desire to produce another volume ‘by Certain Members of the Detection