Anthony Berkeley set in 1920s
London in which a group of
armchair detectives, who have founded the "Crimes Circle", formulate theories on a recent murder case
Scotland Yard has been unable to solve. Each of the six members, including their president, Berkeley's amateur sleuth
Roger Sheringham, arrives at an altogether different solution as to the motive and the identity of the perpetrator, and also applies different methods of detection (basically
deductive or
inductive or a combination of both). Completely devoid of brutality but containing a lot of subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour instead,
The Poisoned Chocolates Case is one of the classic
whodunnits of the
Golden Age of Detective Fiction. As at least six plausible explanations of what really happened are put forward one after the other, the reader—just like the members of the Crimes Circle themselves—is kept guessing right up to the final pages of the book.