Patricia Wentworth published her first novel in 1910 and her last in 1961, and for most of that time she was writing something other than the books she is now remembered for. Miss Maud Silver — retired governess, incessant knitter, quoter of Tennyson — does not appear until 1928, and then does not appear again for nine years. Once Wentworth committed to her, she wrote thirty-two of them.
That is the short version of why a list like this is useful. Her bibliography is roughly seventy books across four series and a long shelf of standalones, published under two different titles on either side of the Atlantic more often than not, and the numbering you see on Amazon does not always match the order she wrote them in. Below is every book we hold, in the order she published it, with the British title noted wherever it differs.
The Miss Silver Mysteries in Order
Thirty-two books, 1928 to 1961. Miss Silver is a former governess who took up private inquiry work, and Wentworth plays her almost entirely straight: she is underestimated in every book, knits through interviews, and is treated as an intrusion by everyone except Inspector Lamb and Sergeant Frank Abbott, who know better. The mysteries stand alone, so you can drop in anywhere — but see the note under the list about where actually to begin.
#1 — Grey Mask · 1928
The one that introduces her, and the odd one out. Charles Moray comes home from four years abroad, lets himself into his own empty house at night, and overhears a masked man giving orders to a room of conspirators — one of them the woman he was going to marry. Miss Silver is barely in it, and it is not really a village mystery. View on Amazon →
#2 — The Case Is Closed · 1937
Everyone agrees the case is closed: Geoffrey Grey is serving life for shooting his uncle. His wife's cousin Hilary happens to share a railway carriage with a woman who says something she should not have, and the whole comfortable verdict starts to come apart. View on Amazon →
#3 — Lonesome Road · 1939
Rachel Treherne holds the family purse strings and is therefore worth more dead than alive. The poison-pen letters are the least of it; the accidents are getting less accidental. Miss Silver arrives as a house guest. View on Amazon →
#4 — In the Balance · 1941
A new bride becomes convinced her husband means to kill her before the honeymoon is over. Miss Silver hears the story on a train and decides not to let it go. Published in Britain as Danger Point. View on Amazon →
#5 — The Chinese Shawl · 1943
Laura Fane comes to Priory Leas to settle the sale of a house she has inherited and finds the cousin who wants it, an old scandal nobody will explain, and a shawl that turns up where it should not. View on Amazon →
#6 — Miss Silver Deals with Death · 1943
When her fiance is lost at sea, Meade Underwood comes to stay at Vandeleur House — a court painter's mansion carved into eight flats, each with something to hide. Miss Silver takes rooms and starts listening. View on Amazon →
#7 — The Clock Strikes Twelve · 1944
A New Year's Eve family gathering at a manor house, an industrialist who has just changed his will, and a household of relatives who all had somewhere else to be at midnight. View on Amazon →
#8 — The Key · 1944
A refugee scientist is found shot in a village church, the door locked and the key missing. Wartime England, a nervous community, and a puzzle that turns on who could have had that key. View on Amazon →
#9 — She Came Back · 1945
Anne Jocelyn died escaping the Germans three years ago — everyone says so. Then a woman walks back into the village with Anne's face, Anne's memories, and a claim on Anne's husband. View on Amazon →
#10 — PILGRIM'S REST · 1946
The Miss Pilgrims will not leave their ancestral house, whatever the offers. Their brother's fatal fall was ruled an accident. Miss Silver comes to Pilgrim's Rest and forms a different view. View on Amazon →
#11 — Latter End · 1947
Lois Latter married into the house she had always wanted. She is disliked by nearly everyone in it, and one evening she is found dead. The suspects are the family she alienated. View on Amazon →
#12 — Spotlight · 1947
Gregory Porlock fills his house party with people who have never met — and who all, it emerges, have reason to fear him. He is stabbed in the back during the evening. Published in Britain as Wicked Uncle. View on Amazon →
#13 — The Case of William Smith · 1948
A man who lost his memory in the war has built a modest life around a name he was given, not one he remembers. Someone would prefer he stopped asking who he used to be. View on Amazon →
#14 — Eternity Ring · 1948
Mary Stokes runs out of Dead Man's Copse having seen, by torchlight, a dead girl in a black coat. By morning there is no body. Miss Silver takes the case anyway. View on Amazon →
#15 — The Catherine Wheel · 1949
An advertisement calls the scattered heirs of a long-dead smuggler to a lonely inn on the coast. Not all of them intend to leave with an equal share. View on Amazon →
#16 — Miss Silver Comes to Stay · 1949
A village where everyone knows everyone's business, a man returning to claim a house, and a murder that makes the gossip suddenly matter. Miss Silver is staying with an old school friend. View on Amazon →
#17 — Mr. Brading's Collection · 1950
Lewis Brading keeps his jewel collection in a strongroom of his own design, and is found shot inside it with the door secured. Published in Britain as The Brading Collection. View on Amazon →
#18 — The Ivory Dagger · 1950
Lila Dryden is found standing over her fiance's body with the dagger still in her hand. She sleepwalks, her old love has just come back, and a good many people wanted the dead man dead. View on Amazon →
#19 — Through the Wall · 1950
A surprise inheritance splits a family living either side of a thin wall in a converted cliff-top house — thin enough that you can hear a quarrel, or a confession. View on Amazon →
#20 — Anna, Where Are You? · 1951
Anna Ball wrote to her friend every week and then simply stopped. Miss Silver takes the governess post Anna vacated and moves into the household she vanished from. Published in Britain as Death at Deep End. View on Amazon →
#21 — The Watersplash · 1951
Edward Random comes back to Deeping with his inheritance gone and his name no longer spoken in the village. Then the gardener is found dead at the watersplash. View on Amazon →
#22 — Ladies' Bane · 1952
Ione Muir has not heard from her sister in months, and the letters that do come are wrong in ways she cannot quite name. She invites herself to the house to find out why. View on Amazon →
#23 — Out of the Past · 1953
Alan Field disappeared on the eve of his wedding to Carmona, who has since made a better marriage. Years later he turns up at the seaside — and is murdered. View on Amazon →
#24 — The Silent Pool · 1953
A famous actress asks Miss Silver for help under an assumed name, having received letters that know rather too much about a life she thought she had left behind. View on Amazon →
#25 — Vanishing Point · 1953
Young women keep disappearing near a village that happens to sit beside a secret government research station. The official view is that they ran away. Published in Britain as Vanishing Point. View on Amazon →
#26 — The Benevent Treasure · 1954
Candida Sayle is taken in by two great-aunts and their family legend: the Benevent Treasure brings death to anyone who looks for it. The aunts are perfectly kind, which is somehow worse. View on Amazon →
#27 — The Gazebo · 1955
Althea Graham's mother is a hypochondriac who never goes near the garden gazebo — and is found dead in it one morning, freeing her daughter to marry. Published in Britain as The Gazebo. View on Amazon →
#28 — The Listening Eye · 1955
Paulina Paine is deaf and reads lips. In a picture gallery she watches two men discuss a murder they have not committed yet, and takes what she saw to Miss Silver. View on Amazon →
#29 — Poison in the Pen · 1955
Anonymous letters are going round Tilling Green, and one of their recipients is dead. Scotland Yard sends for Miss Silver, who is very good indeed at village handwriting. View on Amazon →
#30 — The Fingerprint · 1956
Georgina Grey's guardian is found shot in his study with the door locked. The verdict of suicide suits everybody, which is exactly what makes Frank Abbott uneasy. View on Amazon →
#31 — The Alington Inheritance · 1958
A will that surfaces after the funeral turns a poor relation into an heiress, and puts her in the way of somebody who liked the earlier arrangement better. View on Amazon →
#32 — The Girl in the Cellar · 1961
A girl wakes at the bottom of a cellar staircase with no idea who she is or how she got there — and a strong sense that she should not be found. Wentworth's last novel. View on Amazon →
Where to start with Miss Silver
Not with book one. Grey Mask is a 1928 thriller with a masked conspiracy and a heroine in peril; Miss Silver wanders through it and Wentworth then left her alone for nine years. Readers who begin there often conclude the series is not for them.
The Case Is Closed (1937) is the real beginning — the first book written after Wentworth decided what Miss Silver was for. If you would rather start with the series at full strength, The Chinese Shawl (1943) or Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949) are the ones to hand someone as a sample.
A warning about titles: most of these were published under different names in Britain and America, and the reissues have not settled the question. In the Balance is Danger Point, Spotlight is Wicked Uncle, The Gazebo is The Summerhouse, and Mr. Brading’s Collection is The Brading Collection. If a book looks new to you, check the alternate title before buying it twice.
The Benbow Smith Mysteries in Order
Four books, 1929 to 1937, and not really mysteries — these are between-the-wars espionage thrillers. Benbow Smith is a quiet Foreign Office man with a parrot and no visible job title, who arranges for other people to do dangerous things. Closer to Buchan than to Miss Silver.
#1 — Fool Errant · 1929
Ambrose Minstrel is an eccentric inventor with a process worth stealing, and Hugh Ross takes a job as his secretary without knowing what he has walked into. Benbow Smith, of no stated department, takes an interest. View on Amazon →
#2 — Danger Calling · 1931
Lindsay Trevor, a publisher a few weeks from his wedding, is asked by the stranger opposite him on the train whether he would die for his country. He is a former Secret Service man, and Benbow Smith wants him back. View on Amazon →
#3 — Walk with Care · 1933
A politician dies in circumstances nobody wants examined, and a letter surfaces that would embarrass a great many people. The most political book in the run. View on Amazon →
#4 — Down Under · 1937
Rose Anne Carew leaves the vicarage the evening before her wedding to visit a sick child, and never arrives. Benbow Smith takes on the disappearance. View on Amazon →
The Ernest Lamb Mysteries in Order
Three books. Inspector Lamb is the Scotland Yard man who later turns up throughout the Miss Silver novels, and these are his own cases — solid police procedurals with none of the knitting. Wentworth folded him into the Miss Silver books rather than continuing the series.
#1 — The Blind Side · 1939
Ross Craddock is turning his own aunt out of the family house she has lived in for years. When he is found dead, Inspector Ernest Lamb has a building full of people who are glad of it. View on Amazon →
#2 — Who Pays the Piper? · 1940
Lucas Dale wants Susan Lenox, who is engaged to a penniless young architect, and sets about buying what he cannot win. When Dale is murdered, Lamb finds no shortage of motive. View on Amazon →
#3 — Pursuit of a Parcel · 1942
A package that could change the course of the war is loose in wartime England, and the people hunting it are not fussy. The most thriller-shaped of the three. View on Amazon →
The Frank Garrett Mysteries in Order
Two books, both Foreign Office thrillers in the Benbow Smith mould. Garrett is the department head who sends amateurs into places professionals cannot go.
#1 — Dead or Alive · 1936
A woman whose husband vanished on secret service work three years ago is told he may still be alive — and immediately becomes worth killing. View on Amazon →
#2 — Rolling Stone · 1940
Terry Clive is drawn into a chain of thefts running across Europe, and Frank Garrett of the Foreign Office needs somebody on the inside. View on Amazon →
The Standalone Novels
Twenty-six books with no recurring detective, spanning fifty years — historical romance early on, then adventure, then the sort of romantic suspense she was writing alongside the first Miss Silver books. They are uneven and mostly out of print in paper, but nearly all of them are back as ebooks. Listed by first publication.
- The Fire Within 1913
- Queen Anne is Dead 1915
- The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith 1923
- The Annam Jewel 1924
- The Red Lacquer Case 1924
- The Black Cabinet 1925
- The Dower House Mystery 1925
- The Amazing Chance 1926
- Anne Belinda 1927
- Hue and Cry 1927
- Will o' the Wisp 1928
- Kingdom Lost 1930
- The Coldstone 1930
- Beggar's Choice 1930
- Red Shadow 1932
- Nothing Venture 1932
- Outrageous Fortune 1933
- Touch and Go 1934
- Fear by Night 1934
- Blindfold 1935
- Hole and Corner 1936
- Run! 1938
- Mr. Zero 1938
- Unlawful Occasions 1941
- Silence in Court 1945
- The Devil's Wind 2009
One title is missing from that list on purpose: Red Stefan (1935), a Russian Revolution adventure, is not a mystery in any sense and sits outside what we catalogue here. A Marriage Under the Terror (1910), her first novel and a French Revolution romance, is likewise not currently available as an ebook.
Where to go next
Miss Silver belongs to the same shelf as Miss Marple — the elderly woman nobody takes seriously until the last chapter — and if that is the appeal, our guide to British cozy mysteries and the women sleuths list both run through the same territory. Agatha Christie is the obvious neighbour, and the A–Z of cozy mystery authors is the place to browse sideways.
Everything we hold is on the Patricia Wentworth author page, or go straight to Miss Silver, Benbow Smith, Ernest Lamb and Frank Garrett.