Gwendoline Butler

Page Updated: 18/03/02

Gwendoline Butler

A Cold Coffin

and

Books By Gwendoline Butler

About the Author (Photo by Kinsella Studio)

Bibliography

Audio Tape ISIS (2001)

A Cold Coffin
Two students from the Second City of London’s university go missing, and one is later found dead. Coffin’s investigation of the situation probes deep into the past, laying bare a series of deaths.
For Coffin, the official investigation triggers a more personal examination of his own career, painful reflection on ambition, lovers, and betrayals in his past, and the recognition of a threat to violence in his own character. By the end, with the killer still spitting bitter defiance, Coffin has been forced to confront his own nature and his love for Stella.
‘Should crime novels provide relaxation or bedtime escapism for you, then you could do no better than be introduced to Gwendoline Butler’ Surrey County Magazine
‘Butler has the light touch of a master and a beguiling soul in the somberly monikered Coffin’ US Booklist After reading Classics at London University Michael Tudor Barnes trained at RADA for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He has also worked with the RSC, has played leading roles both home and abroad and has and over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly, but he is probably best known to viewers as Willy Roper in EastEnders.
Unabridged: 8 Cassettes Running Time: approx. 9 hrs

About The Author
Gwendoline Butler is one of the most universally praised of English mystery authors, under both her own name and that of Jennie Melville, and has written over fifty novels under both names. Educated at Haberdashers she read history at Oxford, later marrying Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She has one daughter.
Gwendoline Butler's crime novels are hugely popular in both Britain and the United States, and her many awards include the Crime Writers' Association's Silver Dagger. She was selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The Times and her Coffin series has now been optioned for television. There are twenty-four John Coffin mysteries, eighteen Charmian Daniels mysteries and ten non-series thrillers in print in over twenty countries world wide. Only in her native England are so few of her books available in paperback!
Gwendoline Butler is a Londoner, and was born in a part of South London for which she still has a tremendous affection, and which, under the guise of the Second City of London, is the setting for her Coffin novels, its policing being in the capable hands of Commander John Coffin whose cases now span more than fifteen titles. John Coffin made his first appearance in Death Lives Next Door, first published in 1960 and reissued as a title in The Crime Club Diamond Jubilee Collection in 1990. Other Coffin titles include Coffin on the Water, his baptismal case on demob in 1946; Coffin in Fashion, set in the swinging 'sixties with a lively rag trade background; Coffin Underground, which takes place in 1978 when the South London area is in transition and subject to some very dangerous games; and Coffin in the Black Museum and Coffin and the Paper Man with Coffin established in the heart of the old Docklands where crime is one of the few things to resist the process of gentrification.
Gwendoline Butler also writes as Jennie Melville

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

A Cold Coffin (ISIS, 2001)