''Murder in Crown Passage'' is a 1937 detective novel by the British writer

Cecil Street Cecil John Charles Street (3 May 1884 – 8 December 1964), who was known to his colleagues, family and friends as John Street, began his military career as an artillery officer in the British Army. During the course of World War I, he became a ...

, writing under the

pen name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...

of Miles Burton. It is the sixteenth in a series of books featuring the amateur detective Desmond Merrion and

Inspector Inspector, also police inspector or inspector of police, is a police rank. The rank or position varies in seniority depending on the organization that uses it. Australia In Australian police forces, the rank of inspector is generally the ne ...

Arnold of

Scotland Yard Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London's ...

. Street was one of the most prolific authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. It was published in the United States by Doubleday the same year under the alternative title '' The Man with the Tattooed Face''.Reilly p.1259 As often in the series, the setting is in rural England.

Synopsis

The small country town of Faston Bishop is rocked when a body is discovered in Crown Passage just off the High Street. The man is a

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labourer recently arrived in the area, but nobody has any idea why anyone should want to murder him. Arnold is called in to investigate and soon seeks the assistance of his fried Merrion. Arnold's attempts to pin the crime on a local couple of shopkeepers, is challenged by Merrion who believes it has its roots miles away in London's Docklands.

References

Bibliography

* Evans, Curtis. ''Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961''. McFarland, 2014. * Magill, Frank Northen . ''Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction: Authors, Volume 3''. Salem Press, 1988. * Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015. 1937 British novels Novels by Cecil Street British mystery novels British detective novels Collins Crime Club books Novels set in London {{1930s-crime-novel-stub