Leo Bruce

Leo Bruce is a pseudonym for Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979). Under this name, Bruce wrote several mystery novels. He created two series, one which featured Sergeant Beef, a British police officer, and one that features Carolus Deene, senior history master at the Queen's School, Newminster, who acts as an amateur sleuth. Most of his books are out of print now. Croft-Cooke also wrote some books under his own name, including a collection of short stories entitled Pharaoh and His Waggons and Other Stories.

Sergeant Beef series

• Case for Three Detectives (1936) ISBN 0897330331

An example of locked room type of mystery, this book spoofs other famous fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey called Lord Simon Plimsoll, Hercule Poirot called Monsieur Amer Picon, and Father Brown, called Monsignor Smith.

The remaining books in this series are out of print.

• Case Without a Corpse (1937)
• Case With Four Clowns (1939)
• Case With No Conclusion (1939)
• Case With Ropes and Rings (1940)
• Case For Sergeant Beef (1947)
• Neck and Neck (1951)
• Cold Blood (1952)

Carolus Deene series

• At Death’s Door (1955)
• Dead for a Ducat (1956)
• Death of a Cold (1956)
• Dead Man’s Shoes (1958)
• A Louse for the Hangman (1958)
• Our Jubilee Is Death (1959)
• Furious Old Women (1960)
• Jack on the Gallows Tree (1960)
• Die All, Die Merrily (1961)
• A Bone and a Hank of Hair (1961)
• Nothing Like Blood (1962)
• Such Is Death (1963)
• Death in Albert Park (1964)
• Death at Hallows End (1965) (reprinted in paperback by Academy Chicago Publishers, May 2008)
• Death on the Black Sands (1966)
• Death of a Commuter (1967)
• Death at St. Asprey’s School (1967)
• Death on Romney Marsh (1968)
• Death with Blue Ribbon (1969)
• Death on Allhallowe’en (1970)
• Death by the Lake (1971)
• Death in the Middle Watch (1974)
• Death of a Bovver Boy (1974)

Writing as Rupert Croft-Cooke

• Bosie (1963)
• Troubador
• Give Him the Earth
• Night Out
• Cosmopolis
• Release the Lions
• Picaro
• Shoulder the Sky
• Blind Gunner
• Crusade
• Kingdom Come
• Rule Britannia
• Same Way Home
• Glorious
• Octopus
• Ladies Gay
• Pharaoh With His Wagons
• The World is Young
• The Man in Europe Street
• The Circus Has No Home
• Some Poems
• God in Ruins
• Twenty Poems From the Spanish of Becquer
• The Last Days of Madrid
• The Moon In My Pocket: Life With the Romanies
• Darts
• How to Get More Out of Life
• Major Road Ahead
• The Circus Book
• Blood Red Island
• The Gorgeous East (autobiographical account of his time in India during the Second World War)

References

• Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction, T. J. Binyon (Oxford, 1989) ISBN 0-19-219223-X pp.54,123