Antiques and women are really the only things that I'm interested in. Getting them in the right order can be a problem, because even a fake antique can be absolutely fascination - especially if it drives someone to commit murder. Antiques and women are what led me to Venice on the trail of the killer, and there my modest talents saw me blagging my way into a job as a tour guide as well as lending a hand as a sculptor. My credentials as a tour guide were as bogus as the forgery I was chiselling and it becan to feel like everywhere I turned, nothing was as it seemed. Antiques and women almost got me killed when the bullets started flying . . .

Antiques and women are really the only things that I'm interested in. Getting them in the right order can be a problem, because even a fake antique can be absolutely fascination - especially if it drives someone to commit murder. Antiques and women are what led me to Venice on the trail of the killer, and there my modest talents saw me blagging my way into a job as a tour guide as well as lending a hand as a sculptor. My credentials as a tour guide were as bogus as the forgery I was chiselling and it becan to feel like everywhere I turned, nothing was as it seemed. Antiques and women almost got me killed when the bullets started flying . . .

I don't like to pack too much into an ordinary day and this one had already been pretty eventful - two arguments with women, a fight in a pub, a warning from the Old Bill and a fiasco at auction that lost me an exquisite antique Japanese firefly cage. The trouble was, somebody wanted that little gem even more than I did. It was the key that would unlock a secret they'd to anything to keep under wraps, even murder. If only they could only have gone about their dirty deeds without involving me or my friends, they might have got away with it all, but when the master craftsman bravely trying to teach me the art of gadrooning fell foul of them and paid for it with his life, they had me to deal with . . .

Bruce Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.