The Saltmarsh Murders

The book that hooked Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of C. Day-Lewis) onto the Great Gladys, as Philip Larkin described her, the book combines pure farce, two murders, and a large amount of satire on Agatha Christie's "Murder at the Vicarage", with several of the characters (the vicar, curate, etc.,'s importance to the tale, and their reversal by Mitchell), and the sheer amount of secrets and shameful past every character is concealing. The detection is done in a workman-like fashion by the greatest female detective of all time, Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, later being made a Dame, and the ending is ingenious. All in all, one of the true classics of the genre (though her previous novels, "Speedy Death", and "The Longer Bodies", come close).