Blue Murder

What strange passions seethe beneath the prosperous surface of Flaxborough town? Affable but diligent Detective Inspector Purbright is tasked with uncovering the darker underbelly of greed, corruption and crime. A classic British series of police mysteries, laced with wry humour.
Watson has an unforgivably sharp eye for the ridiculous. - New York Times
Flaxborough is Colin Watson’s quiet English town whose outward respectability masks a seething pottage of greed, crime and vice … Mr Watson wields a delightfully witty pen dripped in acid. - Daily Telegraph A peculiar pornographic movie has been wowing viewers in the Gulf. One of the more scurrilous English Sunday papers gets a tip-off that this exotic blue production stars respected residents of the coastal town of Flaxborough, and a team led by the well-known investigative journalist Clive Grail arrives in a Rolls Royce. Word of the looming scandal soon gets out and the town’s quixotic mayor, Alderman Charlie Hockley, spurred on by the loan of some antique duelling pistols, issues a challenge to Grail! DI Purbright’s stern warning falls on deaf ears, but before the duel can take place a far more sinister fatality occurs… Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson’s tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay. AUTHOR: Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon in south London. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a regional newspaper. His years as a journalist in the Lincolnshire market town proved formative, and he collected there much of the material that provided the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. Watson died in 1983.