Captain Hastings & Anne Foster

Saint Patrick's Day, Dublin, 1929. Captain Arthur has agreed to perform one simple act of kindness: to walk Lady Eleanor's spaniel down to the dog show at the RDS with a green ribbon on his collar.

1 hr 33 min·No. 228

Dublin, and the agency's newest client arrives carrying a flat leather dispatch case and a reputation he is about to lose. Captain Corrigan was one of the men who prepared the great westward Atlantic flight from Baldonnel aerodrome — a modest figure at the edge of photographs full of more famous men.

1 hr 27 min·No. 217

K. He had gone out the night before for one drink only — which became five — at the Long Hall, and somewhere in that companionable haze he agreed to help a mild, wire-spectacled young man named Eamon.

1 hr 27 min·No. 199

Dublin, and the young Arthur & Anne detective agency takes its second client: Mrs Vale, a handsome, iron-composed widow whose impractical nephew Julian has just announced his engagement to a Hungarian countess.

1 hr 27 min·No. 195

Dublin, and a decision that arrives at breakfast wearing the wholly unreasonable appearance of having been obvious all along: Captain Arthur will not go back to London. He will stay — and open a detective agency of his own.

1 hr 30 min·No. 193

Dublin, between the wars: Captain Hastings has come to Ireland to meet the family of Anne Foster, the woman he admires — and quickly decides that being introduced to a houseful of O'Riordans is more perilous than any battlefield.

1 hr 26 min·No. 179

The Belgian Detective is in Brussels, the flat is quiet, and Captain Hastings has just made the mistake of thinking life is ordinary — Anne Foster arrives at Whitehaven Mansions with a message and Pip, a small golden-chestnut spaniel with the moral authority of a Roman emperor; downstairs a charming man with a red leather dispatch case is raising money for a widows' charity that may not exist, a committee meets in the residents' lounge, a bell rings at the wrong moment, a green silk scarf is left on a chair, and by the time the lift doors open again someone is dead in the telephone room with the receiver still in his hand; as Hastings, Anne, and Pip untangle a murder built on blackmail, timing, a single mother-of-pearl bead on the floor, and the discovery that the cleverest killer does not seek an alibi but seeks confusion, Pip and the Bell at Whitehaven is an original Golden Age–style mystery about trust, courage, and a spaniel who uses his nose because it is less easily deceived than the brain.

1 hr 38 min·No. 150

A musketeer, a spaniel, and a murder at the most fashionable charity ball of the season — Captain Hastings is invited to Lady Beatrice Mallory's annual costume ball by the charming Anne Foster and promptly arrives with a borrowed sword, a plumed hat, and Pip the spaniel who was not invited but came anyway; among four hundred guests in masks and finery a man dressed as a harlequin is found dead in the palm room, poisoned, costumed, and posed like a joke no one is laughing at, and with an inspector closing in on the wrong suspect, Anne's sharp eye for detail, a stained glove, a blackmailer's receipts, and Pip's inconvenient talent for finding evidence, Hastings must solve a case built on blackmail, embezzlement, and the desperate lengths a man will go to protect the woman he loves; The Corpse at the Costume Ball is an original Golden Age–style mystery about masks, murder, and the discovery that the most dangerous costume is the one a man wears every day.

1 hr 29 min·No. 148

London, spring 1930s: when Captain Hastings attends the stag dinner of Charles Chudley — charming, debt-prone, and hours away from marrying Cynthia Vale — and wakes the following morning with a strange dog on his blanket, the bride's watch in his coat pocket, and no memory of how either came to be there, the race begins to find a missing bridegroom before two o'clock, a church full of hats, and a family full of aunts can ask questions; what begins as a comedy of misplaced evenings becomes something darker as a veiled lady's note at the Marischal Rooms, a private enquiry office in Bloomsbury, and a corrupt solicitor waiting by the Thames water stairs reveal that Charles was not losing his nerve but trying to save his bride's family from blackmail — and that someone very deliberately planted the bride's glove and watch in Hastings's pocket as a reserve scandal to be deployed if needed; narrated throughout by Hastings with his customary mixture of courage, wrong theories, and accidental brilliance, and solved as much by a small golden-brown spaniel named Pip as by anyone who attended Oxford, The Bridegroom Who Mislaid Himself is an original Golden Age-style mystery about loyalty, false appearances, and the lengths to which a decent man will go to spare someone else's blushes.

2 hr 8 min·No. 138