Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Layton Court Mystery | 1925 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 2 | The Wychford Poisoning Case | 1926 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 3 | Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery | 1927 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 4 | The Silk Stocking Murders | 1928 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 5 | The Poisoned Chocolates Case | 1929 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 6 | 毒巧克力命案 | 1929 | Anthony Berkeley | N/A |
| 7 | The Second Shot | 1930 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 8 | Top Storey Murder | 1931 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 9 | Murder in the Basement | 1932 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 10 | Dead Mrs. Stratton / Jumping Jenny | 1933 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 11 | Jumping Jenny | 1933 | Anthony Berkeley | N/A |
| 12 | Panic Party | 1934 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
| 13 | The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham’s Casebook | 2004 | Anthony Berkeley | Buy |
Roger Sheringham is an amateur detective and crime novelist, self-assured and often wrong in instructive ways. Anthony Berkeley created him partly to satirise the all-knowing detective figure that Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey represented, and Sheringham’s cases frequently expose the limits of confident reasoning. He appears first in The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and returns through thirteen novels and short story collections over a decade.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) is the most formally inventive entry in the series. Sheringham and four colleagues each analyse the same poisoning and each arrive at a different, plausible, and mostly wrong conclusion before the real answer is finally offered. It works as a genuine puzzle novel and as a commentary on how detective fiction builds false certainty.
The later books in the series move toward darker territory as Berkeley’s interest in classical whodunit plotting gave way to the psychological approach he would develop under the Francis Iles name. The short story collection The Avenging Chance (2004) collects Sheringham’s casebook stories, many published originally in magazines during the 1920s and 1930s.