- 'Pure joy to read' NEW YORK TIMES. - 'A vastly entertaining mystery' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. - 'Masterly... worthy to stand on the same shelf as TRENT'S LAST CASE' GLASGOW CITIZEN - Philip MacDonald's crime debut, and the first case of celebrated detective, Colonel Anthony Gethryn. Cabinet Minister John Hoode is found bludgeoned to death with a woodworker's rasp in the study of his country house. Was it an intruder? An insider? The men of Scotland Yard are baffled. Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an Oxford scholar and former ...
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- 'Pure joy to read' NEW YORK TIMES. - 'A vastly entertaining mystery' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. - 'Masterly... worthy to stand on the same shelf as TRENT'S LAST CASE' GLASGOW CITIZEN - Philip MacDonald's crime debut, and the first case of celebrated detective, Colonel Anthony Gethryn. Cabinet Minister John Hoode is found bludgeoned to death with a woodworker's rasp in the study of his country house. Was it an intruder? An insider? The men of Scotland Yard are baffled. Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an Oxford scholar and former British secret service agent, is asked by an old friend to investigate the brutal murder. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Philip MacDonald was born in London into a distinguished literary family in 1900. His grandfather was the fiction writer George MacDonald who inspired C.S. Lewis. After serving in the First World War MacDonald co-wrote his first two novels with his father Ronald. THE RASP was his first solo effort and introduced the British ex-secret service agent and newspaper reporter, Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an amateur detective who would feature in over a dozen of MacDonald's novels, several of which were adapted for the screen by such eminent directors as Michael Powell and John Huston. MacDonald became one of the most popular crime writers of the 1930s with novels such as THE NOOSE, THE LINK and THE MAZE. He moved to California in 1931 to be a screenwriter and wrote and produced more than a hundred scripts for the Hollywood studios, his most famous being that for Alfred Hitchcock's REBECCA. His last book THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (published in 1959 and also featuring Anthony Gethryn) is generally regarded as his best. He died in California in 1980. PRAISE FOR PHILIP MACDONALD: 'Pure joy to read' THE NEW YORK TIMES; 'The more I read his work, the better I like it' THE SUNDAY TIMES; 'MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterisation and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioners' ANTHONY BOUCHER; 'Most entertaining and ingenious' THE SPECTATOR; 'However tastes may differ, most people would admit that Philip MacDonald is one of the half-dozen best writers of detective fiction' GLASGOW HERALD; 'Mr MacDonald, almost alone among detective story-writers, mixes literature with murder' TIME AND TIDE.
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