THE SINKING ADMIRAL Book Launch 15 June 2016

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club’s collaborative novels, and now, eighty-five years later, fourteen members of the club have once again joined forces to launch (hmm, pardon the pun) The Sinking Admiral.

‘The Admiral’ is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, The Admiral Byng. ‘The Admiral’ is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord’s dinghy. None of them are as buoyant as they should be, for the pub is threatened with closure due to falling takings.

Tempers are already frayed due to the arrival of a television documentary team when Fitzsimmons is found dead in his tethered boat. The villagers assume a simple case of suicide and fear that their debt-ridden pub will now sink without trace. The journalists seem determined to finish the job by raking up old skeletons, but they weren’t banking on the fact that this story has been written by 14 extremely competitive crime writers – arch bamboozlers who will stop at nothing to save a good pub.

The Sinking Admiral, edited by the Detection Club’s outgoing President – author and broadcaster Simon Brett, OBE – continues a tradition established by the Detection Club’s founders in 1931 when Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and eleven other esteemed authors wrote The Floating Admiral, a ‘collaborative novel’ to challenge themselves, fox their readers and help to pay for the Club’s running costs. 14 of today’s leading crime writers have repeated this unique game of literary consequences, producing an original, ebullient and archetypal whodunit that will keep readers guessing right up to what crime lovers insist on calling the dénouement…

The contributors  are:
SIMON BRETT
KATE CHARLES
NATASHA COOPER
STELLA DUFFY
MARTIN EDWARDS
RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS
TIM HEALD
MICHAEL JECKS
JANET LAURENCE
PETER LOVESEY
MICHAEL RIDPATH
DAVID ROBERTS
L.C. TYLER
LAURA WILSON
all members of The Detection Club.

 

Collins Crime Club  Hbk £14.99 Purchase it here

 

 

Goldsboro Books played the genial host to the book’s launch. And here’s the photographic evidence, m’lud.

David Stuart Davies, Mike Jecks & Geoff (CADS) Bradley

Janet Laurence

Len Tyler, Michael Ridpath and Aline Templeton

"I've got all these to sign," says Martin Edwards

Old Chums - Geoff Bradley and Peter Lovesey

Harper Collins Editor

Just for a laugh - Geoff, Peter and Simon Brett