Bognor tries to understand how a publishing magnate could have been crushed by smut. Before retiring for the night, Vernon Hemlock pours a brandy, lights a cigar, and takes a look at his cache of pornography. Far more than a wad of dirty magazines stashed under a mattress, this is a collection of some of the world's finest erotica, dating back as far as a dirty doodle drawn by da Vinci. The millionaire publisher is perusing the Swedish section when the shelves begin to move. By the time he notices the walls closing in on him, it is too late. Vernon Hemlock has been flattened by filth. This would not normally bother Simon Bognor, but he fears it will be bad news for his book deal. A stridently lazy Board of Trade investigator, Bognor stumbled his way into a handshake deal with Hemlock to write a kind of memoir. With his publisher dead, Bognor has no choice but to find the man who squashed the king of porn and confront his own greatest fear: hard work. “Dazzling and...

Description Denis Compton was one of England's -indeed cricket's -greatest batsmen. In the summer of 1947 alone he scored 18 hundreds. A flashing strokeplayer who could take any bowling attack apart, he also played football at the highest level, winning an FA Cup-winners medal with Arsenal. The original 'Brylcreem Boy', perhaps British sport's first true media personality, Compton cut a dashing figure, and when he died was mourned as the kind of cricketer whose like we shall never see again. 'Never have I been so deeply touched on a cricket ground as I was in this heavenly summer when I went to Lord's to see a pale-faced crowd existing on rations, the rocket bomb still in the ears of most folk -see this worn, dowdy crowd watching Compton. The strain of long years of anxiety and affliction passed from all hearts at the sight of Compton in full sail... There were no rations in an innings by Compton' Neville Cardus 'Compton was not the last of the double internationals, but he was...

When Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, arrives for a semester as Visiting Fellow at his old friend's university down under, he is met with a nasty surprise. Indeed the surprises keep coming and they get nastier as the plot unravels. An exotic cast of suspicious academics includes an ecologically-correct axeman, a professor of wine and the world's leading authority on an esoteric form of Australian hedgehog. Then there is the student body to consider, too.This mystery began as a homage to Michael Innes's Death at the President's Lodgings, written when he too was a visiting academic in Australia, but this sparkling novel is emphatically set in the twenty-first century.

As head of the Criminal Studies department at the University of Wessex, Doctor Tudor Cornwall has murder on his mind. One violent death that has always bothered him is the killing of Alec D'Urberville in the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of The D'Urbervilles.He therefore decides to rewrite Hardy's account in the style of his contemporary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, This task is complicated by a real-life contemporary murder that bears some uncanny resemblances to the nineteenth century fiction. With the help of his brilliant young postgraduate favourite, Elizabeth Burney, Doctor Cornwall sets about unravelling these two parallel mysteries.

An ancient country custom goes awry, killing a man and spoiling Bognor's holiday. At the annual Clout, the men of Herring do as they have done for centuries, firing arrows blindly into the woods and allowing their women to retrieve what they have shot. Nobody ever kills anything, but it's a jolly time nonetheless – until the day when a few of the arrows find their mark, pinning a wayward customs inspector to a tree in a bloody parody of Saint Sebastian. It's rotten luck for the dead man, and not much better for Simon Bognor. Bognor huffs when he hears of the killing, knowing that he is going to be sucked into investigating the death. A special inspector for the Board of Trade, Bognor is always getting invited to crime scenes, despite knowing almost nothing about crime. His bad lungs, sour attitude, and fleshy physique are out of place in the countryside, but Bognor is in for the duration. He will find the person who caused the accident – or the next arrow's target...

A Simon Bognor mystery - On the eve of the Flanagan Fludd Literary Festival, the Reverend Sebastian Fludd is discovered gently swinging from the end of a rope in his own church. While Sebastian's cousin and lord of the manor, Sir Branwell Fludd, is keen to wrap up the affair with the minimum of fuss, Branwell's friend, Sir Simon Bognor, is more concerned to get to the truth. Did the mild-mannered vicar really take his own life - or was his unexpected demise the result of something more sinister?