The Sinking Admiral

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Clubs collaborative novels, in which twelve of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, fourteen members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral. The Admiral is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, The Admiral Byng. The Admiral is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlords dinghy. None of them are as buoyant as they should be, for the pub is threatened with closure due to falling takings. Tempers are already frayed due to the arrival of a television documentary team when Fitzsimmons is found dead in his tethered boat. The villagers assume a simple case of suicide and fear that their debt-ridden pub will now sink without trace. The journalists seem determined to finish the job by raking up old skeletons, but they werent banking on the fact that this story has been written by 14 extremely competitive crime writers arch bamboozlers who will stop at nothing to save a good pub. The Sinking Admiral, edited by the Detection Clubs outgoing President author and broadcaster Simon Brett, OBE continues a tradition established by the Detection Clubs founders in 1931 when Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and eleven other esteemed authors wrote The Floating Admiral, a collaborative novel to challenge themselves, fox their readers and help to pay for the Clubs running costs. Now, 85 years later, 14 of todays leading crime writers have repeated this unique game of literary consequences, producing an original, ebullient and archetypal whodunit that will keep readers guessing right up to what crime lovers insist on calling the dnouement The contributors to The Sinking Admiral are: SIMON BRETT KATE CHARLES NATASHA COOPER STELLA DUFFY MARTIN EDWARDS RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS TIM HEALD MICHAEL JECKS JANET LAURENCE PETER LOVESEY MICHAEL RIDPATH DAVID ROBERTS L.C. TYLER LAURA WILSON all members of The Detection Club.