Gwendoline Butler

Page Updated: 18/03/02

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Gwendoline Butler - Page 2

Coffin's Game

A Double Coffin

Coffin on Murder Street

Coffin in the Black Museum

Coffin Underground

First British Edition HarperCollins (1997)

Coffin's Game
In the aftermath of a terrorist expulsion in London’s Second City, a battered corpse is found in a damaged building. But it is soon evident that this is no bomb victim. A sadistic killer has mutilated the remains, removing the fingertips and leaving the face unrecognisable. The only clue to the corpse’s identity is a handbag found at the scene. Its owner: Stella Pinero, actress wife of Chief Commander John Coffin.
The investigation which follows is complicated by Coffin’s refusal to believe that the remains could be Stella’s, and Chief Superintendent Archie Young faces the unenviable task of questioning a superior officer as to the sort of men his wife was in the habit of associating with. Meanwhile, the secretive Inspector Lodge of the Terrorist Investigation Squad harbours fears of his own. When a second body is discovered, Coffin finds himself drawn into a nightmarish game. The murder inquiry reveals terrible truths as it unfolds, bringing pain and bitterness to John Coffin as he is forced to confront death and treachery in his own backyard.

First British Edition HarperCollins (1996)

A Double Coffin
See Review by Liz Lees
A visit to the riverside apartment of the long retired former prime minister, Richard Lavender, is to have startling consequences for John Coffin. For it transpires that the old man, nearing the end of his life, has a confession to make: he is the son of a serial killer. He tells Coffin how, as a boy, he helped to bury one of his father's victims. Feeling death is near, he wants to repair and reclaim the past - with Coffin's help. Unsure whether Lavender is caught up in fantasy or telling the truth, Coffin agrees to investigate and appoints Chief Inspector Phoebe Astley to the task. But then a young woman is found murdered on a foggy November night, and all too soon the sins of the past and present come together in a terrifying denouement.
'This is one for fanciers of the offbeat macabre' James Melville, Ham & High
'Gwendoline Butler writes detective novels that both in method and atmosphere are things apart, not only from the main body of crime writing, but even from the mass of general fiction… she achieves that real whodunit pull.' The Times
'Gwendoline Butler is very good and getting better'. Spectator

First British Edition Collins (1991)

Coffin on Murder Street
Regina Street in the Second City of London, in which John Coffin is responsible for keeping the peace, was nicknamed Murder Street, for it had known more than its fair share of murders and violent deaths. One inhabitant predicted that worse was yet to come. A mass murder would soon happen, he claimed, if the police did not listen to him. But the local police dismissed him as an eccentric. Was it the malign influence of Regina Street (or Murder Street) that operated upon the owner of a coach business called Terror Tours, as a result of which he and his coachload of tourists disappeared? But the loss of the Terror Tour was only the background to the more terrible story of the disappearance of a small boy at a time when a circle of pederasts was moving into Coffin's territory. The boy is the child of a young actress, herself something of an enigma, working in the St Luke's Theatre close to where John Coffin lives. Once again, John Coffin and actress Stella Pinero are closely involved in murder, as the story behind the boy's disappearance unfolds into a history of jealousy and love.
Praise for Coffin On The Water
'John Coffin's baptismal case on demob . . . dispenses a thick gnomic atmosphere of obsession and doom.' Christopher Wordsworth, Observer
'Bodies in the river, anonymous letters, eccentric characters with stage and dockland associations, lots of local colour and contemporary detail help end the densely packed plot. It's splendid stuff.' F.E. Pardoe, Birmingham Post
'Interesting and original characters are depicted against an impressionistic, atmospheric background of late 1940s London.' T.J. Binyon, The Times Literary Supplement
'Combines a credible quest for a killer with a memorable word picture of the way in which a community has had its attitudes to life and death shaped by the horrors of war.' Bolton Evening News
'Delightful to have a new book from Gwendoline Butler about Coffin, her South London detective.' Marghanita Laski; Listener

First British Edition Collins (1989)

Coffin in the Black Museum
That long-serving and ever-hopeful policeman, John Coffin, has now received well-deserved promotion, and has command of his own Force in the newly created Second City of London, established on the old Docklands.
He knows he will face problems in a Force put together out of several old Metropolitan police; districts, but he does not expect all he gets. Some of it is personal. To his surprise he finds that his sister Letty has set up a Theatre Workshop in an old church, St Luke's, where he comes across an old love, Stella Pinero, a celebrated actress now turned producer. He knows from experience that both ladies can bring trouble with them. And they do.
This time it is a double murder. In the course of investigating this crime, Coffin uncovers a multiple murder in the past. At first there seem too many bodies, too many suspects and too few clues, but in the famous Black Museum of his Force he finds the essential evidence which leads to the unwinding of this most savage case. With a theatrical background and a new city, a fascinating new world opens up for John Coffin to walk in. He means to go on walking there.
'Nicely atmospheric suspicions curdle in new community. The writing suggests that the solution is just below the surface of the prose: so near, yet so far.' Matthew Coady, Guardian
'Atmospheric and well-managed mystery.' Rachel Laurence, Liverpool Daily Post
'The tightly constructed narrative offers a perplexing crime, neatly solved, as well as fascinating portraits of intellectuals, children and memorable working-class characters, all interacting believably.' US Publishers Weekly

First British Edition Collins (1988)

Coffin Underground
The year is 1978, the place South London, the area that by the river at Greenwich which has been the scene of earlier investigations by detective John Coffin. Now he is back, a senior and much respected police officer, called home in charge of his own small team of detectives. He has been handed the task of overseeing the local detective branch and of bringing it up to maximum efficiency. Like all men of strong character, he has his critics and his enemies, and he knows that this job will arouse hostility. It may lead to yet higher promotion, but for the time being he must work underground.
But even as he embarks on the job, he is involved in a series of violent happenings which have their roots in the past but take their terrible form from an early manifestation of a very contemporary phenomenon.
The brutality of the crimes which follow springs from a fantasy world of games. But these games are deadly, played out according to rules by masters, acolytes and victims, and Coffin finds himself caught up in one for whose climax he is totally unprepared.