Death in the House
Death in the House is a 1939 detective novel by the British writer Anthony Berkeley. It was one of a number of stand-alone novels he wrote alongside his series featuring the private detective Roger Sheringham. It was his penultimate novel, and his final whodunnit. In later years he continued writing reviews of other crime novels, but no longer wrote his own.
The plot revolves around the topical issue of the Indian Independence movement. Maurice Percy Ashley in the Times Literary Supplement observed "In his new novel Mr. Anthony Berkeley has evidently set out to show that a detective story dealing with politics need not be dull. If this is his intention, he succeeds admirably". While Cecil Day-Lewis writing under his pen name Nicholas Blake in The Spectator considered that "Mr. Berkeley has also temporarily lost his length. Death in the House is badly overpitched, offering us a murder-method so fanciful that any schoolboy could crack it for six. This is a pity, because the set-up in general is excellent".