The Five Matchboxes

Some secrets can only stay buried for so long…

After the police receive an advanced warning of his impending murder, stockbroker Granville Collins is found shot dead in his office.

The windows were closed; the door was locked.

There is not a window broken or a single sign of forced entry.

The building was under police observation at the time: no one except Collins entered, and no one left.

On Collins’ desk, someone has left five empty matchboxes, each with a small hole forged in one side.

The sheer impossibility of the crime spooks even hardened Detective Inspector Garth, who becomes increasingly determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

But as the list of suspects with potential motives grows ever longer, the interwoven webs of lies and intrigue make matters even more complicated.

Could this murder be linked to an unsolved crime that dates back over fifteen years – the notorious ‘Clothes Cupboard’ mystery?

With blackmail, murder, omissions and lies, the well-buried secrets of the past begin to surface once more...

Can Inspector Garth get to the bottom of this murder? Or will the truth evade him?

Praise for John Russell Fearn

“I have yet to read a book employing the same murder method. It is unusual and imaginative ideas like this that make [Fearn’s] books worth tracking down and reading.” – Pretty Sinister

“… A pioneer of science fiction […] he was one of the Greats of the earlier ages, and his name should be there with Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Murray Leinster, and all the others whose thoughts and works formulated today’s modern science fiction.” — John Carnell, New Worlds

John Russell Fearn was an extremely prolific and popular British writer, who began in the American pulps, then almost single-handedly drove the post-World War II boom in British publishing with a flood of science fiction, detective stories, westerns, and adventure fiction. He was so popular that one of his pseudonyms became the editor of Vargo Staten’s Science Fiction Magazine in the 1950’s. His work is noted for its vigor and wild imagination. He has always had a substantial cult following and has been popular in translation around the world. He passed away in 1960 at the age of 52.

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