Arbuthnot is paying for a rash decision - he recently married a beautiful but slightly amoral girl whose crazy antics caught his rather cynical professional interest. His wife has taken a lover, Rupert Slade, and Arbuthnot wants nothing more than to see him dead - but then it happens!

Fifty years after Ralph Dangerfield's death, a collector of literary curiosities claims to have his diary and threatens to blackmail fashionable London with belated secrets about people now in respectable old age. Sir John Appleby reveals how he uncovered this unscrupulous crime, along with seventeen more intriguing cases.

Author of detective novels, Priscilla Pringle, is pleased to find that she is sharing a railway compartment with a gentleman who happens to be reading one of her books - Murder in the Cathedral. He offers her œ500 to collaborate on a detective novel.

There are fifteen stories in this compelling collection, including: Poltergeist - when Appleby's wife tells him that her aunt is experiencing trouble with a Poltergeist, he is amused but dismissive, until he discovers that several priceless artefacts have been smashed as a result.

Sir John Appleby's son, Bobby, assumes his father's detective role in this baffling crime. When Bobby finds a dead man, in a bunker on a golf course, he notices something rather strange - the first finger of the man's right hand is missing.

At Mullion Castle, sumptuous stately home, we meet the Earl and his family. Charles Honeybath, has been commissioned to paint a portrait of the Earl's wife, but finds himself at the helm of a complex investigation involving ancestral works of art and a young under gardener.

Inspector Appleby arrives on the scene when one of Ferryman's cousins is found shot dead in the study, in a mystery built on family antagonisms.