Flaxborough Crab
An elderly sex-pest is at large in DI Purbright’s home town.
Leaping out from behind bushes at unsuspecting females, making lewd suggestions and, when challenged, scuttling away with odd off-balance leaps, he soon earns the nickname of the ‘Flaxborough crab’. No one can identify him, and it turns out that quite a few older gentlemen have begun exhibiting over-familiar behavior around the opposite sex.
Suave Dr Meadow knows more than he is letting on, yet how can Purbright, aided once again by the fragrant but dodgy Miss Lucy Teatime, get him to talk? Events take a darker turn before the ill-assorted pair succeed in catching their crab.
Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson’s tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay.
Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon, England. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a local newspaper in a Lincolnshire market town. His years as a journalist there proved a formative experience, and he collected then much of the material that formed the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. He died in 1983.