Showing titles in Dramatisations

They never came tougher than Marlowe, a cynical, world-weary, wise-cracking shamus whose honesty in a dishonest world sent him down the mean streets again and again in search of some kind of justice. Ed Bishop stars as Philip Marlowe in these powerfully atmospheric BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of Raymond Chandler's novels.

Full-cast adaptations of five of Peter Lovesey's acclaimed novels featuring Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb and his assistant Constable Thackeray Tough, shrewd and determined, Sergeant Cribb is a stalwart of Scotland Yard's newly formed Criminal Investigation Department. Aided and abetted by...

Hercule Poirot is a guest at a weekend house party, given at the Cornish cliff top home of the celebrated actor Sir Charles Cartwright. The other visitors include keen amateur detective Mr Satterthwaite and distinguished Harley Street nerve specialist Sir Bartholomew Strange. Death visits the...

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. This dramatisation, set in...

In a shocking scandal, the like of which has not been seen in the English aristocracy since the eighteenth century, Lord Peter Wimsey's elder brother, the Duke of Denver, stands accused of murder. Lord Peter is determined to prove his brother's innocence, yet finds him strangely uncooperative...

Bernard Braden stars in an original 1940 full-cast production of the very first Paul Temple adventure. Between 1938 and 1968, the exploits of amateur detective Paul Temple and his wife, Steve, enthralled generations of BBC radio listeners. Theirs was an exciting world of violence and glamour - car bombs and cocktail parties. In Paul and Steve’s very first adventure, starring Bernard Braden as Paul, with Peggy Hassard as Steve, a spate of jewel robberies in the Midlands has left the police baffled.

An international cast of suspects, all passengers on the crowded train, are speeding through the snowy European landscape when a bizarre and terrible murder brings them to an abrupt halt. One of their glittering number lies dead in his cabin, stabbed a mysterious twelve times. There is no lack...

For thirty years the fictional crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of BBC Radio's most popular series. They inhabited a sophisticated world of chilled cocktails and fast cars, a world where Sir Graham...

Patrick Hamilton is renowned for his gritty, slice-of-life tales chronicling the hopes, dreams and obsessions of London's working class in the inter-war years. This collection brings together his key pieces, together with some lesser-known classics and a bonus 2004 documentary exploring his achievements and legacy.

Ten guests travel to an island at the invitation of someone named U.N. Owen. All are strangers, but they have two things in common: they have all been responsible for someone's death, and none will leave the island alive. Over the next two days and nights, each of the guests is killed off in a...

A foggy night... a lonely country house... and a woman with a gun in her hand quietly surveying the dead body of her husband. It looked like a straightforward case of murder. Or was it? As the ghosts of an old wrong begin to emerge from the past, the case begins to look anything but...

Lady Tresselian invites several guests to stay at her seaside house at Gull’s Point. Against her better judgment she has allowed her late husband’s ward, handsome tennis ace Neville Strange, and his wife Kay to come at the same time as Neville’s ex-wife Audrey. Other guests include Mary...

Full-cast dramatisations of seven of Ruth Rendell's tense psychological thrillers. This collection includes The Bridesmaid, Going Wrong, King Solomon’s Carpet, People Don’t Do Such Things, The Fever Tree, The Dreadful Day of Judgment and Thornapple. Among the casts of these seven suspenseful adaptations are Jamie Glover, Mark Strong, Reece Shearsmith, Paul Rhys, Danny Sapani and Juliet Aubrey.

Hercule Poirot and his good friend Captain Hastings are enjoying a well-deserved break on the Cornish Riviera. Wandering along the terrace of the Hotel Majestic on the first morning of their stay, Poirot literally falls at the feet of a pretty, dark-haired girl and, much to Hastings' delight...

This was to be her last day alive. The renowned criminal psychologist Ira Samin prepared her suicide thoroughly. The death of her eldest daughter had weighed too heavily on her conscience for her to carry on and she yearned for one last drink to raise a toast to oblivion. Her morbid plans are interrupted and she is called in to negotiate a gruesome hostage situation at a radio station where a psychopath is playing a morbid game.

For thirty years the fictional crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of BBC Radio's most popular series. They inhabited a sophisticated world of chilled cocktails and fast cars, a world where Sir Graham...

Famous crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, visiting her friend Judith Butler in the little town of Woodleigh Common, is invited to a Hallowe'en Party put on by society hostess Mrs Rowena Drake for the local teenagers. During her preparations for the party, the conversation turns to Ariadne's grisly...

Young Gwenda Reed arrives in England from New Zealand, travelling ahead of her husband Giles and charged with the task of finding the perfect place to make their base. In the quiet village of Dilmouth, she finds a house with immediate appeal. A few renovations will convert it into her ideal home...

The collected BBC Radio 4 crime dramas featuring Inspector Coleman and Sergeant Astor Like his actor namesake, Ronald Coleman is a suave, well-spoken English gentleman. But although he's a movie buff, Coleman is no film star - he's a copper, and a Detective Inspector to boot. Together with his...

Radcliffe Emerson, the irascible husband of fellow archaeologist Amelia Peabody, has earned the nickname "Father of Curses"—and in Mazghunah he demonstrates why. Denied permission to dig at the pyramids of Dahshoor, he and Amelia are resigned to excavating mounds of rubble in the middle of nowhere.