Here in one volume are ten of the best of Roy Vickers's celebrated Department of Dead Ends detective stories. These are detective stories with a difference; the ‘inverted’ type of detective story. Knowing from the start who the murderer is, the reader is presented with the motive, the workings of the criminal’s mind, the crime itself, and all the clues.

The ‘surprise’ in Mr Vickers’s stories is, of course, supplied by the way in which his murderers are detected; and this is where the Department of Dead Ends comes in – that repository of files which were never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in his Scotland Yard museum - a rubber trumpet, maybe, or a bunch of red carnations. Then events move inexorably to their appointed end.