Product Description

A well-known amateur football drops dead shortly after half-time in a match between Arsenal Football Club and top amateur side The Trojans in front of 70,000 spectators-- every one a witness to murder.

Inspector Anthony Slade of Scotland Yard arrives at the Arsenal Stadium to investigate and is immediately faced with two questions: Who was the mysterious girl who inquired after the murdered player at the end of the match and who was the last person to leave the visiting team's dressing-room?

The key to the mystery is buried in the records of another football club and in the background of another mysterious death. Inspector Slade and his assistant, the reliable but not altogether bright, Sergeant Clinton, travel far and wide and find themselves with no shortage of likely suspects. Slade gradually pieces the puzzle together before finally catching his man with a lot of good old fashioned police-work and a sneaky trick.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302644 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Review
...it does the double: while scoring highly for nostalgia, it also holds its own in the suspense stakes. --Independent on Sunday, September 28, 2008

Review
....the pace is consistent throughout and an enjoyable read it is too.

About the Author
Leonard Gribble was a prolific author who wrote and edited more than 160 books during his career. His books were translated into a multitude of foreign languages and he sold well in excess of two million copies during his lifetime.

Born on 1st February 1908, Leonard Reginald Gribble wrote his first novel The Case of the Marsden Rubies in 1929 and, three years later, he married Nancy Mason with whom he had one daughter, Lois. During World War II, Leonard Gribble served in the Press and Censorship Division of the Ministry of Defence before resuming his writing career in 1947 with the publication of Atomic Murder.

Anthony Slade of Scotland Yard was, without doubt, his greatest creation with forty five books featuring a string of mysteries and cases for the sleuth to unravel. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery remains his most successful work and was made into a movie in 1940 starring Leslie Banks, Greta Gynt, Arsenal manager George Allison and many of the Arsenal squad of that time.

In addition to his many books, Leonard Gribble also contributed numerous short stories and feature articles to leading national and provincial newspapers and to many magazines both in the UK and overseas.

He devised and wrote programmes for commercial radio and inaugurated BBC Radio's Empire Bookshelf series. He was a founder member of the Crime Writers Association.

Customer Reviews

It's better than the movie
I guess these days most people know the Arsenal Stadium Mystery as a black and white movie which is available now on DVD. And for most of us that's where it stops.

Back in reality this was a book first - and an incredibly popular book too. Translated into loads of languages, a top seller for an author already highly established as a crime writer, it was loved for giving a real insight (the first ever public insight) into what it was actually like inside the UK's, and arguably Europe's top club.

And that is what makes the difference between the book and the movie. The movie includes a few shots of the players, and the odd bit of chit chat, but in essence footballers aren't actors, and so there was a limited amount that could be done.

The novel has no such restrictions and takes you inside the club, as well as being a jolly read in terms of being a detective novel.

But much more than this, this book was a first - it was the first football novel. What it should have been was the first in a long series - but somehow that series never materialised. Football fiction died - had a life again in comic form with Roy of the Rovers - and then died again.

There are signs these days that football fiction is returning - one thinks particularly of "The Man Who Hated Football" and if it does finally get under way as a genre in its own right it will be entirely due to this one book.

If you are an Arsenal fan you will get far more about the Arsenal out of reading this novel than you ever will from the movie, and you'll have good fun read too. Give it to someone who is an Arsenal supporter with everything - they probably won't have this one.