George Gently Mysteries (1-12) - Alan Hunter

Written by Alan Hunter
Read by Andrew Wincott
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 48 Kbps
Unabridged

Description below by the original uploader Peterg23

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All are unabridged, narrated by Andrew Wincott and are encoded from CDs at 48 kbps / 44 kHz Mono Fraunhofer CBR MP3.

#1. Gently Does It (1955). 6 hrs 51 mins.
The last thing you need when you’re on holiday is to become involved in a murder. For most people, that would easily qualify as the holiday from hell. For George Gently, it is a case of business as usual. The Chief Inspector’s quiet Easter break in Norchester is rudely interrupted when a local timber merchant is found dead. His son, with whom he had been seen arguing, immediately becomes the prime suspect, although Gently is far from convinced of his guilt. Norchester City Police gratefully accept Gently’s offer to help investigate the murder, but he soon clashes with Inspector Hansom, the officer in charge of the case. Hansom’s idea of conclusive evidence appalls Gently almost as much as Gently’s thorough, detailed, methodical style of investigation exasperates Hansom, who considers the murder to be a straightforward affair. Locking horns with the local law is a distraction Gently can do without when he’s on the trail of a killer…

#2. Gently by the Shore (1956). 7 hrs 2 mins.
You’ll find plenty of bodies stretched out on a summer beach - but they’re not usually dead…In a British seaside holiday resort at the height of the season, you would expect to find a promenade and a pier, maybe some donkeys, ‘Kiss-Me-Quick’ hats, candy floss and kids building sandcastles. You would not expect to find a naked corpse, punctured with stab wounds, lying on the sand. Chief Inspector George Gently is called in to investigate the disturbing murder. The case has to be wrapped up quickly to calm the nerves of concerned holidaymakers. No one wants to think that there is a maniac on the loose in the town but with no clothes or identifying marks on the body, Gently has a tough time establishing who the victim is, let alone finding the killer. In the meantime, who knows where or when the murderer might strike again?

#3. Gently Down the Stream (1957). 6 hrs 19 mins.
Time spent messing about on the river isn’t supposed to end with a brutal murder. The staff at Stoley’s Boatyard were used to holidaymakers returning their pleasure cruisers a little late after a week or so exploring the network of waterways around Norchester. They were not used to finding their yachts burned almost beyond recognition with the charred remains of a client still aboard. Taking on the murder investigation, Chief Inspector George Gently faces an inquiry like no other he has ever handled. Somewhere beneath the lies of the victim’s wife, somewhere obscured by the brittle edge of her daughter’s fear, somewhere hidden by her son’s hysteria, lies the truth…

#4. Landed Gently (1957). 5 hrs 46 mins.
Having been invited to spend Christmas in the country, fishing for pike, Gently finds himself hunting a completely different predator when a guest at Merely Hall, a nearby stately home, is found dead at the foot of the grand staircase on Christmas morning. At first the tragedy is assumed to be a simple accident, but Gently is not one to jump to conclusions and is soon in no doubt whatsoever that this was murder. Merely produces the finest tapestries in England but the threads that Gently must unravel in his investigation are more complex than any weaver’s design, with everyone from the lord of the manor to his most lowly servant falling under suspicion…

#5. Gently Through the Mill (1958). 6 hrs 3 mins.
Fifth in the George Gently police procedural series, set in the 1950s. A corpse is found in a flour hopper in a village bakery. Such accidents aren’t unknown, but this one isn’t an accident, and the corpse isn’t local. Gently is sent to investigate what small time gambler and crook Steinie Taylor was doing out of his usual haunts, and why someone killed him. The local police are only too willing to tag it as a crime just passing through, but as Gently’s team starts digging, they find far too many locals with secrets to hide. Taylor and two friends had been splashing money around, but where did the money come from? Taylor’s friends might know, but one of them turns up dead. The other might have the only evidence that could convict a killer — if Gently can get to him before the killer does.

#6. Gently in the Sun (1959). 6 hrs 6 mins.
The heat is on when a beautiful young woman is found dead on an English beach at the height of summer. Every man in Hiverton knows Rachel Campion. She is the most gorgeous girl to have turned up in the fishing village in living memory. When she is discovered lying dead on the beach, Gently joins the throngs of summer visitors on their annual pilgrimage to the seaside in the midst of a summer heatwave and as the temperature soars, the mystery deepens. The long-buried skeleton of a woman is unearthed close to where Rachel’s body was found and Gently suddenly has the riddle of two mysterious deaths to solve. Many of the locals, including the secretive brotherhood of fishermen, seem particularly reluctant to help Gently answer the vital questions: Why was Rachel Campion murdered? How is the old skeleton connected with the new crime? And who is the murderer?

#7. Gently with the Painters (1960). 6 hrs 53 mins. Thanks to Antoek.
The death of a young artist leaves Gently desperately piecing together the portrait of a murderer. When artist Shirley Johnson is murdered and her body dumped outside a provincial police headquarters, Gently is dispatched from London to Northshire to take over the investigation. The prime suspect appears to be the woman’s husband, a former bomber pilot with a guilty secret, but the other members of the woman’s art group also have strong views about her and her controversial final painting - Dark Destroyer. With so many suspects to consider, Gently must get to the bottom of the mystery before the murderer manages to slip through his fingers…

#8. Gently Go Man (1961). 5 hrs 48 mins.
Speed makes the teenage bikers feel alive, but they soon find that murder is the fastest way to die. A five-mile stretch of arrow-straight road outside Latchford acts like a magnet to beatnik bikers using the road like a drag strip. When one of the bikers is killed in an accident, most people regard it as an inevitable consequence of the kids using drugs and racing bikes for kicks. But the evidence points to the young man’s death being something more sinister than a mere accident and George Gently is drawn into a world populated by disaffected teenagers, with a jazz soundtrack and a background of murder…

#9. Gently to the Summit (1961). 6 hrs 14 mins.
Mountaineer Reginald Kincaid disappeared during an expedition to climb Mount Everest. His body was never recovered, lost on the mountain slopes like so many other casualties - so it comes as a shock to his fellow climbers when he turns up again 22 years later. Is this man really Kincaid? How could he possibly have survived? The mystery invokes suspicion when Kincaid’s climbing partner on the Everest attempt, Arthur Fleece, falls to his death on Mount Snowdon. A feud that had erupted between Fleece and the resurrected Kincaid sparks a murder investigation for George Gently with a ‘dead’ man as the prime suspect…

#10. Gently Where the Roads Go (1962). 5 hrs 58 mins. Thanks to Antoek.
Chief Inspector George Gently finds himself dodging bullets when he investigates the murder of a trucker who died in a hail of gunfire. Murdered in a lonely lay-by in the heart of the countryside, the trucker is identified as a Polish immigrant. Was this a revenge killing, a quarrel over money, an underworld execution or something even more sinister?

#11. Gently Floating (1963). 6 hrs 26 mins. Thanks to Antoek.
Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that’s if you can call having too many suspects, too many potential murderers, ‘a good thing’. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim’s skull and dump him in the river…

#12. Gently Sahib (1964). 5 hrs 13 mins. Thanks to Antoek.
If a tiger mauled a man to death, would he bother burying the corpse? An escaped tiger that terrorizes a little market town is shot dead by a police marksman, having caused nothing more than a minor panic. A year later, a man is found mauled to death and neatly buried in his own back garden. The only thing George Gently can be sure of is that the tiger didn’t bury the body, so who did?

Alan Hunter (1922-2005) was an English author of crime fiction.
All of his 46 novels feature Inspector George Gently and are mainly set in East Anglia.
Initially a farmer, he became an antiquarian bookseller before writing his first novel.