[Inspector Stoddart 01] • Man With the Dark Beard

*“Nobody would have murdered him,” Miss Lavinia cried. “Everybody liked John!”

“I’m afraid it is evident that someone did not.”*

The note left beside Dr. John Basted's corpse simply read: ‘It was the man with the dark beard.’

Dr. Basted hadn't approved of his daughter Hilary's fiance. So when Hilary's father is found shot dead inside his own office, the door-key turned from the inside, the fiance Basil Wilton becomes a chief suspect for Scotland Yard. Yet how could the crime have been engineered?

Now an important lacquered box is missing; a former colleague of Basted's has suddenly shaved his beard; and the doctor’s ex-secretary has come mysteriously into money. Before Inspector Stoddart of the Yard can form conclusions, another murder takes place, again credited to the “Man with The Dark Beard”...

*The Man With the Dark Beard* is the first of Annie Haynes’ Inspector Stoddart mysteries, originally published in 1928. It is a sparkling lost classic from the early golden age of crime fiction.

“Miss Haynes, I think, improves steadily – this is the best detective story she has yet written.” *Time and Tide.*