The Six Queer Things

Young Marjorie Easton, desperate to escape a dreary life under her penny-pinching uncle, takes a position as live-in assistant to Michael Crispin — a shadowy figure who makes his living by channelling the spirit world for grieving clients. But what begins as psychological suspense rapidly deepens into something far darker. The house on the hill holds secrets that defy explanation, and Marjories employer may be less a psychic medium than something altogether more sinister.

When murder shatters the household, Detective-Inspector Morgan arrives to find a crime scene unlike any he has encountered. The six strange objects discovered in the victims home point to motives and identities that shift like sand. As Morgan methodically unpicks the evidence, the true horror at the centre of the story — and the identity of the "spider who spun it all" — remains stubbornly, maddeningly out of reach.

First published in 1937, The Six Queer Things is a cross between Golden Age detective fiction, Victorian Gothic, and occult thriller — a genuinely unsettling novel that keeps its reader guessing to the last pages. The New York Times called it "mystery and horror, laid on with a trowel."

C. St. John Sprigg (1907–1937) wrote seven detective novels and pioneering works on aeronautical engineering before volunteering to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in action at Jarama on 12 February 1937, aged twenty-nine.