When Miss Pongleton is found murdered on the stairs of Belsize Park station, her fellow boarders in the Frampton Hotel are not overwhelmed with grief at the death of a tiresome old woman. But they all have their theories about the identity of the murderer, and help to unravel the mystery of who killed the wealthy ‘Pongle’. Several of her fellow residents – even Tuppy the terrier – have a part to play in the events that lead up to a very dramatic arrest.

Murder Underground, by Mavis Doriel Hay, is a classic murder mystery novel set in and around the Northern Line of the London Underground and has now been republished for the first time since the 1930s, by the British Library as a new edition to its successful crime classics series.

On its original publication in 1934, crime writer Dorothy L Sayers reviewed it thus in the Sunday Times: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most feckless, exasperating and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’

Mavis Doriel Hay (1894 to 1979) was a novelist of the golden age of British crime fiction. Her three novels – of which Murder Underground was the first – were published in the 1930s and are now very rare. The other two – The Santa Klaus Murder and Death on the Cherwell – are also republished by the British Library.