The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn - ISBN: 9780349146935
Paperback
A true crime. A perfect murder. The killer walks free.

The Mouthless Dead

'Completely addictive' Jonathan Coe

$31.50

  • Paperback

    288 pages

  • Release Date

    11 March 2025

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Summary

A powerful period crime novel based on a true story, by the author of Curtain Call and Our Friends in Berlin

The Wallace Murder was a national cause celebre of the 1930s, and is still unsolved over ninety years later. One night in January 1931 William Herbert Wallace, a 52-year-old insurance agent in Liverpool, was handed a phone message at his chess club purporting to come from a ‘Mr Qualtrough’ who wanted to put some work his way. He had left an address in south…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780349146935
ISBN-10:0349146934
Author:Anthony Quinn
Publisher:Little, Brown Book Group
Imprint:Abacus
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:288
Release Date:11 March 2025
Weight:350g
Dimensions:230mm x 152mm x 24mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Anthony Quinn has found an ingenious way of shaping the story into a gripping work of fiction… a compelling mixture of crime story and character study * Sunday Times *
A voyage of discovery… this superior whodunnit becomes a danse macabre as the terrible truth is gradually revealed * The Times *
Anthony Quinn is one of our most underrated novelists, so I’m always happy to sing his praises. Initially, The Mouthless Dead is a fictional account of the infamous unsolved murder of housewife Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931. But then the story and its narrator takes a series of unexpected turns until its final, chilling paragraph. I was gripped * Red Magazine *
A dark, unsettling, completely addictive mystery, which draws you in with all the momentum and all the loving attention to period detail that we’ve come to expect from Anthony Quinn * Jonathan Coe *
A beguiling real-life crime thriller and an elegiac meditation on murder, marriage and loneliness * Chris Brookmyre *
This absorbing account of one of the most famous unsolved British murder cases creates a fascinating narrative about what really happened. The Mouthless Dead is as engrossing as it is unsettling * Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths *
Intensely readable and indelibly haunting – Alexander Larman * Observer *
Thrilling… the final fifty pages accelerate until breathing becomes almost impossible * Financial Times *

About The Author

Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2013 he was the film critic for the Independent. His novels include The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award; Half of the Human Race; The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize; Curtain Call, soon to be a feature film starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton; Freya, Eureka, Our Friends in Berlin, London, Burning and Molly & the Captain. He also wrote the recent Liverpool memoir Klopp.

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