Showing results by narrator "Bill Wallis" in All Categories

Elizabethan England, and a dastardly Spanish plot to take over the throne is uncovered. It's up to Agent Archie Noble to save Queen and country in this saucy and swashbuckling romp from the bestselling author of The Flashman Papers and The Pyrates. Spoiled, arrogant, filthy rich, and...

Gareth Cadwallader Owen is the Mamur Zapt, the Head of the Khedive's Secret Police. However, unlike his British colleagues, Owen works for the Khedive. It's not a comfortable perch, as agitation for political and social restructuring grows. Furthermore, Owen is married to a pasha's daughter, Zeinab, herself straddling a cultural divide.

"I see murder in this unhappy hand...." When Mrs. Robinson, palmist to the Prince of Wales, reads Oscar Wilde's hand she cannot know what she has predicted. Nor can Oscar know what he has set in motion when, that same evening, he proposes a game of "Murder" in which each of his Sunday Supper Club guests must write down those whom they would like to kill. For the fourteen "victims" begin to die mysteriously, one by one, and in the order in which their names were drawn from the bag....

From the author who brought the world Paddington Bear, comes the new book in the delightful Parisian mystery-series featuring Monsieur Pamplemousse and his canine partner, Pomme Frites. In this latest adventure, they must get to the bottom of a mystery surrounding the tarnishing of the integrity of Le Guide - France's premier hotel and restaurant guide. What they couldn't anticipate was that the case would involve a nun who is in the habit of joining the Mile High Club...

The Old Inn clings precariously to a cliff top above a storm-lashed ocean. Ethan and Cathy are sick. Their father has left them to fetch a doctor... but they are not alone for long. A visitor comes begging for shelter, and so the children, who have an unnatural appetite for stories of a macabre persuasion, sit out the throes of the storm in the company of a sailor with more than enough grisly tales to satisfy them.

i>Le Guide, France’s top gastronomic guide, is failing to whet the appetite of its audience in America. Bribed by the director with offers of some time off, Monsieur Pamplemousse agrees to flex his literary muscles in a bid to address the problem by writing a play. The result is the ex-detective’s directorial debut, complete with walk-on part for faithful bloodhound Pommes Frites. But disaster strikes on opening night....

The undersecretary of the British embassy in Istanbul has died while attempting to swim the Dardanelles Straits. The circumstances of his death have to be investigated, so the Foreign Office sends out an officer: Sandor Seymour, an unobtrusive Special Branch detective.

Murder comes in two familiar forms. Whether as a crime of passion with high emotions or a cold dispassionate plot to take life in order to gain in some way, the act strikes us all as somehow inhuman. Beneath us as civilised beings. But however we cloak our animal instincts the need to remove a human being and gain relief from abuse or gain from money, the term is just the same – MURDER. Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, W W Jacobs and many others bring their literary heft to bear in as calculating a way as any killer could.

Fed up with questions about what he was going to do when he retired, Edward decided to get on his bicycle and ride from Le Havre to the Mediterranean. He struggled in Normandy to get directions from old men tipsy on Calvados by 9 am, passed by prairies of corn and acres of sunflowers, and hit his stride on the towpath of the Burgundy canal. He explored the mystery of what an ouvrier eats for lunch, and was barred from a swimming pool because his trunks were too decent.

This collection of short stories contains several gothic tales to bear macabre and chilling witness to writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft. These tales are designed to unsettle you, just a little, as you sit back, and take in their words as they lead you on a walk to places you’d perhaps rather not visit on your own.

In this eclectic selection of biographical sketches Bill Deedes remembers some of the key figures of the twentieth century. Political heavyweights such as Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden are reassessed and reevalued, while record breakers such as Sir Edmund Hillary and Roger...

Throughout John Mortimer's career, he established profound friendships with people accused of various crimes. He also indulged his passion for writing, penning Paradise Postponed and a series of stories about Rumpole, for whom he was often mistaken. With wit, wisdom and tenderness, he has written the story of his life.

Edward Enfield came to his three quarters of an acre knowing nothing about growing anything, and this book is an account of his horticultural successes and failures, inventions and frustrations, discoveries and developments. With wry humour, he leads us through the thorny subject of roses, counts the blessings of keeping chickens, and exposes the perfidy of gardening copywriters, while offering wise and witty tips on how best to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Translated by Sandra Smith, with an introduction by Patrick Marnham.In 1929, 26-year-old Irène Némirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her second novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Française and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul.Golder is a superb creation.

Following the best-selling Summer of a Dormouse, Sir John Mortimer - playwright, novelist, octogenarian, and erstwhile QC - offers up more lessons in living and growing old disgracefully. What would we like to leave to our descendants? Not a third-rate painting or our PEPS, according to Sir John, but a love of Shakespeare, a taste for alcohol, the ability to defeat boredom, the importance of never locking the lavatory door, and so on.

As the clouds of World War I threaten to engulf Egypt, Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, head of the Secret Police, confronts a series of personal and professional challenges, from the pitfalls of his marriage, to a riot in Cairo's Camel Market.

In 'Rumpole and the Millennium Bug', the loveable barrister is regretting the advent of the 21st century, and the arrival of a new, computer-literate clerk. But as Christmas approaches, can Bernard 'the Millennium Bug' prove to Rumpole that technology can be useful after all? Bill Wallis reads this special seasonal story starring Horace Rumpole, scourge of all QCs and friend of the criminal classes.

The outrageous and irrepressible Baroness (Ida 'Jack') Troutbeck, Mistress of St Martha's, has another cultural battle to win against the British Establishment: this time, against the horror of modern art, as demonstrated by the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. But shortly after she enthusiastically announces this war to her close friends, Baroness Troutbeck is kidnapped. Panic spreads throughout the London art world when they realise nine more victims are missing,

This collection of short stories contains several gothic tales featuring the macabre and chilling voices of writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit, and MR James. These tales are designed to unsettle you, just a little, as you sit back and take in their words as they lead you on a walk to places you’d perhaps rather not visit on your own.

One of the 21st century's most celebrated authors, Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in her phenomenally successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third novel in the series, 2020's The Mirror and the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. This collection includes three of her best works of contemporary fiction, ranging from the Gothic to the blackly comic.