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This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.

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Driven to madness by the cruelty of a small group of people, a young novelist sets about taking murderous revenge.Simon Whalley is an unsuccessful novelist who is gradually going to pieces under the strain of successive setbacks. Brooding over his troubles, and driven to despair by the cruelty of his neighbours, he decides to take his revenge in the only way he knows how – by planning to murder them . . .Lynn Brock made his name in the 1920s and 30s with the popular ‘Colonel Gore’ mysteries, winning praise from fans and critics including Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot. In 1932, however, Brock abandoned the formulaic Gore for a new kind of narrative, a ‘psychological thriller’ in the vein of Francis Iles’ recent sensation, Malice Aforethought. Advertised by Collins as ‘one of the most remarkable books that we have ever published’, the unconventional and doom-laden Nightmare provided readers with a disturbing portrayal of what it might take to turn an outwardly normal man into a cold-blooded murderer.This Detective Story Club Classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the ‘John Stableford’ Golden Age mysteries, who finds philosophy at the heart of Brock’s landmark crime novel.

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