THE MOQUETTE MYSTERY

Andrew Martin

How can solving a murder hinge on identifying the pattern on a piece of cloth?

And why was the clue sent to the police before the murder had been committed?

The detective who shows up in London’s Quarmby & Bates department store is eager to be shot of the case. For the young May Mitton in Fabrics and Furnishings, newly down from the North, though, this coarse but rather beautifully patterned scrap appears to come from a train – but which, and where . . .?

May’s investigations take her out into Metroland, to Oxford, back to her home town of Halifax and the Isle of Wight – and into the mysterious world of moquette, with its celebrity designers and its impossible complexity of railway companies and carriage classes.

Set just before the war in the heyday of department stores and Art Deco, The Moquette Mystery is a crime thriller as colourful and summery as its elusive pattern.

‘Delightful crime caper set in London and Halifax just before WW2. A tale full of great period detail and memorable characters’, Mail on Sunday

‘A brilliantly readable murder mystery’, Camden New Journal

‘Enjoyable. The textile details are many and fascinating’, Yarnstorm

BY THE AUTHOR OF SEATS OF LONDON

October 2025              

224pp

£9.99

198 x 129 mm

Paperback

978 1 0685162 4 5

Crime fiction

Andrew Martin is the author of Seats of London, the Jim Stringer crime novels and, most recently, To the Sea by Train.

‘A perfectly crafted little gem of a murder mystery set in 1938 and features an amateur sleuth gumshoeing round the country in search of the murderer of a London Underground poster artist.

She’s aided by an unusual clue: a scrap of moquette – that carpet-like material, often adorned with mesmeric patterns, that covers the seats on British public transport. In addition to its virtues as an atmospheric period whodunnit, this is a love letter to a golden age of design’, Daily Telegraph

‘Lovely book, with fab descriptions of life in 1938, both in London and the North - nice story and brilliant to make a book out of moquettes!’, Christian Wolmar