PAGEANT OF MURDER
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: The Special Sub-Committee Meets
CHAPTER TWO: So Does an Inner Circle
CHAPTER THREE: Town Hall Rehearsal
CHAPTER FOUR: The Day of the Pageant
CHAPTER FIVE: Doings at Squire’s Acre and the Town Hall
CHAPTER SIX: The Reclamation of Falstaff
CHAPTER SEVEN: Exit a Poor Player
CHAPTER EIGHT: Councillor Perse Takes a Hand
CHAPTER NINE: The Death of Henry VIII
CHAPTER TEN: Mistress Ford and Mistress Page
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Environs of Brayne
CHAPTER TWELVE: Head Tucked Underneath His Arm
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Second Pageant, Part One
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Second Pageant, Part Two
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Death of Edward III
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Some Questions Answered
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Dame Beatrice Puts In Her Oar
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Sunday School Point of View
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Droit de Seigneur
CHAPTER TWENTY: On the Trail of a Youthful Councillor
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Batty-Faudrey Angle
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Special Sub-Committee Disbands
The dull but important little town of Brayne, situated somewhere between London and Windsor, is celebrating its new status as a borough. Among other festivities, the Council have decided to stage an historical pageant. Along with other celebrities are figured Shakespeare’s Falstaff and two English Kings—Henry VIII and Edward III.
The persons taking these parts are apparently innocent and harmless, and yet, in turn, all three are murdered, not, it seems, so much for their own sins as for the long-ago short-comings of the characters they represent in the pageant.
Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley and her secretary, Laura Gavin, succeed in unravelling the mystery, Laura by making a somewhat gruesome discovery in the little river on which Brayne stands, and Dame Beatrice by applying to the case what the immortal Jeeves would call “the psychology of the individual.”
Dead Man’s Morris
Come Away Death
St Peter’s Finger
Printer’s Error
Brazen Tongues
Hangman’s Curfew
When Last I Died
Laurels Are Poison
The Worsted Viper
Sunset Over Soho
My Father Sleeps
The Rising of the Moon
Here Comes a Chopper
Death and the Maiden
The Dancing Druids
Tom Brown’s Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil’s Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Merlin’s Furlong
Faintly Speaking
Watson’s Choice
Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose
