The Skeleton Key (1919) was the first detective novel published by Collins, ushering in the Golden Age, the Crime Club, and 100 years of remarkable crime fiction that would follow. A body is discovered after a shooting party in the grounds of a country house in Hampshire. The police are called in, and a clever young detective, Sergeant Ridgway, begins to unravel a much more complicated and brutal case of murder than was first suspected. But has he met his match with Le Sage, a chess-playing Baron, who is convinced that the answers lie not in Hampshire but in Paris? ...