Although this is a re-release of an older book the story is just as fresh as it was the first time around. Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Slade and his partner Sargent Clinton must solve the mystery of a footballer who is murdered on the playing field in front of fans and players alike with no obvious signs of foul play. The characters are both believable and likable and the scenes of football play were exciting to even a non football following reader. Adding real life characters although from the past helped to bring the story alive. The mystery moves seamlessly through various locations and suspects forward and backward in time. The more you learn of the facts the more complex the mystery becomes as the detectives search for the clues to the present murder in a past event. The story keeps your interest while the facts unraveled and up to the climix. I will definitely look for more books by this author.

One of the the 3 or 4 titles in this series that was truly awful; not just "this isn't my style so I'm not enjoying it" but for reals bad. I basically sighed and gritted my teeth through the last half, mainly propelled by hatred and petty spite. Did this just punish myself? Yes.

This is an inside-the-locker room tale by a journalist using the real life Arsenal players from 1938. It oozes verisimilitude. In places it seems like a professional sports team today, in other places it seems like an impossibly distant time, closer to Victorian gentlemen versus players than the modern sportainment.

The "mystery" is a painfully obvious puzzle with clues practically underlined in red and inserted randomly in the story. Don't try to apply logic or psychology, forget means, motive and opportunity, just assemble the clues to point to the villain. It's made much easier if you assume that none of the real people in the book are going to be accused of a fictional murder, so you are left with a grand total of three suspects.

The writing is fluid and occasionally stylish when describing action on the field or dialog among real people, but wooden and pedestrian when handling made-up characters or venturing outside the stadium.

If you love football and its history, particularly if you are an Arsenal fan, I recommend the effort to plow through this less-than-middling mystery. If not, find another book.

Good mystery. I really enjoyed it. Engaging characters and an interesting plot that seamlessly combines fact and fiction. I highly recommend it.

I have to admit that this is the first mystery novel that is set in the world of football. You could probably write everything I know about football on a postage stamp and still leave room for a margin, which is a bit pitiful for a Brit, it being our national sport. Still, that didn't really matter when it came to reading this book. Although football and more particularly the gunners gave the scene for this story, it didn't mean that a non-football fan couldn't still enjoy it and get a lot out of it.
Like many of these classic mysteries from the golden age of the genre, the mystery revolves around a small cast of characters, many of who seem to have a motive for killing the person who meets their untimely end. As often is the case in books like this, the victim, Doyce, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, which means that not only could there be a lot of people who want to do away with him, but also you can't really mind too much that he is killed off.
I don't want to go into the various motives or do anything that might give the identity of the killer away. I will say though, that I did manage to solve the mystery, although I did think that some of the background was a little bit far fetched.
Overall, this is an enjoyable mystery read. If you like classic mysteries, even if football isn't usually your thing, I think you'll enjoy this.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own

When a soccer player collapses and dies at a London stadium, it is up to Inspector Slade to catch the killer. He always gets his man. With little cooperation from those most likely to know anything useful, it is challenging. The man was not popular, and motives or potential motives abound. Slade suspects the murder is connected to the death of a girl a few years ago. He just needs to make the puzzle pieces fit . . . and he finally does. I enjoyed this Golden Age mystery and would love to read more books with Inspector Slade. I received an advance electronic copy from the publisher through NetGalley with the expectation of an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for my copy of this book. “The Arsenal Stadium Mystery” is a solid and well written murder mystery that fits into the Golden Age genre. Though I enjoyed how the story played out, there were a few disappointing bits in the book: Slade isn’t interesting in any way, the connection with the Arsenal team seems to exist only to set the story partially in the sports world, and this book could have easily been written surrounding any other topics other than sports. I have nothing against sport centered mysteries (is that even a thing?), but I with Arsenal played a bigger role in this story in order for it to live up to its title.

When Jack Doyce collapses during a football match and dies not much later it doesn’t take long to discover that he was murdered. And a suspect appears just as quickly: Phillip Morring was Doyce’s business partner. His death means Morring receives a large sum of money from the life insurance. They were on the football team together, so Morring had the opportunity to poison him and when Slade discovers that Morring’s fiancée was having an affair with Doyce it seems that everything fits together perfectly. But Slade isn’t fully convinced, especially after he finds out that Doyce was implicated in a tragedy that happened a few years back. Is someone taking revenge? But the evidence against Morring is piling up as well, so is perhaps the most obvious solution the right one after all?

The mystery itself is solid and keeps you guessing. It does require some suspension of disbelief (among other things, the plot only works because a girl told nobody whom she was getting engaged to, not even her own father) but not more than in the average golden age mystery.

In a solid mystery, I can usually excuse bland detectives and Slade is very bland. (How bland? you ask. Well, on Goodreads his name was mistakenly given as MacDonald and I had not noticed that and happily called him as MacDonald in this review until I looked up a quote in the book and saw that he was in fact called Slade). And with the exception of Pat Laruce – Morring’s fiancée – so are most side-characters. They are in fact, for a mystery novel, surprisingly sensible. Morring, for example, immediately tells the police about the fact that he gains a lot of money from Doyce’s death. He is slightly less forthcoming about his fiancée but once he realizes that the police know, he comes clean immediately – and so do most other characters in similar situations. Only Pat, the already mentioned exception, is as unhelpful as possible and has her own agenda. As such she’s more like a character one is used to from mysteries but next to all the others, she appears more like a comical caricature.

Then there’s the football connection which felt forced. The victim is a football player who died during a match. But he could just as easily have been killed during a weekend country house party. Neither the football nor the cameos by Arsenal players and the manager added anything to the story. Perhaps you have to be a real football-fan for that and care a lot about Arsenal (and its 1939 team) to get anything out of that and with my casual ‘I pay some attention to the German league table and am happy when certain teams are in the upper half’ attitude it didn’t really work.

And then there’s…

“Well, Inspector?” asked the Arsenal manager. “I’m afraid Dr Meadows doesn’t think it was an accident,” said
the Yard detective.

Epithets. So many of them. Any character who appears more than one will have an epithet that gets used frequently. I have spent too much of my teenage years reading bad Harry Potter fanfiction full of the dark-haired boy, the blonde man, the Gryffindor star-pupil and the boy who could talk to snakes* and now I am very allergic to epithets of all kinds.

All in all, I think this book might be interesting for people who are very interested in football history. The rest can easily miss it.



*I am not suggesting that only one fandom has this problem. Or even only fanfiction, as this book proves. But that’s where I got my overdose of this particular bad style-advice

An up-and-coming star soccer player collapses in front of several thousand fans during a match at the Arsenal Stadium in London. Scotland Yard is summoned when he later dies and Inspector Slade comes to the scene. Slade and his assistant Sergeant Clinton investigate the murder amidst the local colour of the soccer stadium, the teams and their routines. At the beginning of the story there's some running commentary about the on-field action, but intimate knowledge of the soccer game is not necessary to follow the story. Of course there's plenty of non-sports activity involving the players' personal lives and careers which leads to the introduction of several interesting characters.
As with many Golden Age mysteries, the murder victim here is not well liked by others, leaving the inspector a full slate of potential killers, both in the soccer world and the victim's personal life. The investigation narrative flows smoothly at a good pace to a dramatic reveal scene in which the killer is unmasked by Inspector Slade.
It's a solid police procedural murder mystery which I can recommend, particularly to fans of the Golden Age mysteries.
Martin Edwards's Introduction at the beginning of the book provides insight to both the story and the author. It's worth reading.
Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and Netgalley for providing an advance reading eBook of this novel. The views expressed are my own.





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"The Arsenal Stadium Mystery" is a mystery set in England and originally published in 1939. It provided a unique look at soccer (football) at that time.

The mystery was a clue-based puzzle mystery. The detective methodically questioned the suspects and manipulated them to get answers when they didn't want to explain things. By following up on the clues and motivations, he was able to see past what the killer and suspects wanted him to believe and find the truth. I did guess whodunit about the same time as the detective started to suspect that person (though the detective doesn't clearly admit whom he suspects and why until the end).

There was no sex. There was occasional use of bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting mystery.

I just love these book from the golden age. This one, I simply could not put down and read it in one sitting. Don't know much about soccer, or the teams, but I did not need to as the story made itself understood and flowed fabulously till the very end. The characters where well drawn, and the intrigue just kept me interested till the end.
I am so happy that these books are being republished and they are really enjoyable to read and puzzle out the mystery.