Dead Man’s Quarry

Ianthe Jerrold was born in 1898, the daughter of the well-known author and journalist Walter Jerrold, and granddaughter of the Victorian playwright Douglas Jerrold. She was the eldest of five sisters.She published her first book, a work of verse, at the age of fifteen. This was the start of a long and prolific writing career characterized by numerous stylistic shifts. In 1929 she published the first of two classic and influential whodunits. The Studio Crime gained her immediate acceptance into the recently-formed but highly prestigious Detection Club, and was followed a year later by Dead Man's Quarry.Ianthe Jerrold subsequently moved on from pure whodunits to write novels ranging from romantic fiction to psychological thrillers. She continued writing and publishing her fiction into the 1970's. She died in 1977, twelve years after her husband George Menges. Their Elizabethan farmhouse Cwmmau was left to the National Trust.

"The murderer was also riding a bicycle... why, if we can trace it, we shall have the murderer!"

On a cycling holiday in idyllic Herefordshire countryside, Nora and her friends make a gruesome discovery - the body of their missing comrade at the bottom of a quarry. But an apparently accidental fall turns out to have been murder - for the man was shot in the head.


Fortunately John Christmas, last seen in The Studio Crime (1929), is on hand with his redoubtable forensic associate, Sydenham Rampson. Between them they shed light on an intricate pattern of crimes... and uncover a most formidable foe.


Dead Man's Quarry is the second of Ianthe Jerrold's classic and influential whodunits, originally published in 1930.